Maybe it’s less objectionable to make fiction of the real person known as Ottis Toole, since he never was innocent, tried to burn down half his neighborhood and walked Main Street for tricks.
So you might say it doesn’t matter that Ellory says Knotts was raped when she wasn’t, that he fictionalizes the date, that he makes up “Cherokee County.”īut Dianne was a real person. Violent American primitivism is exotic to Brits, though they were never as civilized as they thought and we’re even less civilized than they think.
And you can tell because he says the victim is “called” Elizabeth Knotts that he’s British. Ellory’s 2010 novel The Anniversary Man, which says, “And so it went on – killings through Christmas, through January, February and March of 1980.” It lists bodies dumped “at the side of the highway,” killings of “mom-and-pop owners of a liquor store in Austin, Texas,” then, “Twenty-first of November, while robbing a motel in Jacksonville, Cherokee County, Lucas raped, then shot to death, a thirty-one-year-old woman called Elizabeth Knotts.”Įllory’s novel is what most novels are: fiction. Brenda and Becky at the pool at the Malabar, 1979, image courtesy Knotts familyĪnd then there’s chapter 47 of R.J.
