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JK Rowling.
‘I’ve got not intention of quitting’ … JK Rowling. Photograph: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP
‘I’ve got not intention of quitting’ … JK Rowling. Photograph: Joel C Ryan/Invision/AP

JK Rowling says villain who wears women's clothes is based on real cases

This article is more than 3 years old

The author’s new Robert Galbraith novel, Troubled Blood, has faced accusations of transphobia

JK Rowling has said that the character of Dennis Creed, the serial killer in her new novel who has provoked accusations of transphobia because he dresses up in a woman’s coat and wig, is loosely based on two real-life murderers.

Troubled Blood, in which private detectives Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott investigate the case of a female GP who disappeared decades earlier, was published earlier this week by Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith. A review in the Telegraph prompted widespread attacks on the author, including a Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling, after it described one of the possible suspects in the disappearance of the GP, Dennis Creed, as a “transvestite serial killer”, asking “what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress”. Others hit back, with Nick Cohen suggesting the Telegraph review misrepresented a novel in which “transvestism barely features”.

Creed lures his victims into his van by wearing a woman’s coat and wig, but the novel never describes him as a transvestite – although it does tell how, as a young man, he stole women’s underwear from his neighbours and masturbated into it.

Writing on Galbraith’s website, Rowling has now revealed that Creed “was loosely based on real-life killers Jerry Brudos and Russell Williams – both master manipulators who took trophies from their victims”.

Brudos killed four women in Oregon during the 1960s. As a young man, he stole female underwear from his neighbours, according to The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, which also cites reports of “a large man, dressed in women’s clothing” in the garage from where he abducted his victim Karen Sprinker. Williams was sentenced to life in prison in 2010 for murdering two women. The former commander of Canada’s largest air force base, he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder, two sexual assaults and 82 counts of breaking and entering, which saw him take hundreds of items of underwear from women and young girls.

Rowling said that “change, loss and absence” were the “biggest themes” of the book, but that it also explores the “changing face of feminism and ideals and stereotypes of femininity … through the cast of characters”.

The vanished GP, Margot Bamborough, is a feminist who once worked as a Bunny girl, Rowling continued, and Robin, who is “approaching 30, going through a divorce and asking herself how she could ever reconcile a demanding and sometimes dangerous job with motherhood”, finds the “complexities” of the vanished woman’s life mirrored in her own.

Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in the Strike series, runs to more than 900 pages, and as well as Creed features suspects including “a womanising patient who seems to have developed feelings” for Margot, and “a passive-aggressive husband who wanted her to quit her job to become a full-time mother”.

Rowling said she “always knew it would be lengthy”, because the investigation takes place over more than a year, but that it was her “favourite of the series by far and I think the length is necessary to do the story justice”.

“I’ve got no intention of quitting any time soon. I’ve already started number six. Being Robert Galbraith is pure pleasure, so as long as I’ve got plots, I’ll keep going,” she wrote on Galbraith’s website.

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