newspaper that "it was a hoax ... a whopping fib". Knight's friend and fellow Ripper aficionado Colin Wilson thought the story was "obvious nonsense" but shortly after Knight's tragically early death from a brain tumour he wrote in his defence: "he wrote the book with his tongue in his cheek, then found himself caught up in a success that prevented him from retracting or quietly disowning it." Influence Despite its many inconsistencies, Knight's and Gorman's conspiracy theory has captured the imagination of other authors, who have made further modifications to the story. For example, Melvyn Fairclough's The Ripper and the Royals (London: Duckworth, 1991) asserted that Lord Randolph Churchill was the "third man", although Fairclough later disowned his own book and told reporters that "he no longer believes the theory". Andy Parlour, Sue Parlour and Kevin O'Donnell, authors of The Jack the Ripper Whitechapel Murders (St. Osyth, Essex: Ten Bells Publishing, 1997), supposed that Mary Jane Kelly was pregnant with Albert Victor's child instead of Annie Crook. These, and other books which promote Sickert from a knowing accomplice to being Jack the Ripper himself, such as Jean Overton-Fuller's Sickert and the Ripper Crimes (Oxford: Mandrake, 1990) and Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer (2002), are marketed as non-fiction books, but they are dismissed almost universally as derivative fantasies based on Knight's initial flawed analysis. The conspiracy theory outlined in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is fictionalised in two plays: Doug Lucie's Force and Hypocrisy (1986) and Sherlock Holmes and the Ripper Murders by Brian Clemens. Four films have used elements of the theory: Murder by Decree, Jack the Ripper, The Ripper and the Hughes Brothers' From Hell, which was based on a graphic novel of the same name by Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell. Knight's theory features in the final book of Philip José Farmer's Riverworld series, Gods of Riverworld, and novels utilising Knight's book as a base include Robin Paige's Death at Whitechapel (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2000) and Anne Perry's The Whitechapel Conspiracy (London: Headline, 2001). See also Jack the Ripper in fiction Jack the Ripper suspects Notes References Sources Aronson, Theo (1994). Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld. London: John Murray. . Begg, Paul (2003). Jack the Ripper: The Definitive History. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education. . Cook, Andrew (2006). Prince Eddy: The King Britain Never Had. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus Publishing Ltd. . Cornwell, Patricia