[Historybuff]

As long as we are talking about Yates, I enjoyed his book Of Death and Time, mostly about Indy racing in '55 (with a little bit of James Dean's death thrown in,)
until at the end of the book I realized that he had said at the outset that a fictional reporter was going to be employed throughout. So that meant that every quote in the book from race drivers and such didn't happen because if the reporter didn't exist there was no witness to what each person quoted said. I used a few paragraphs done in a similar fly-on-the-wall style to set the opening scene in my book but the chapters that follow employ real quotes wherever possible. So while a Yates on Shelby book would be fun to read and very flamboyant , I don't want to read it if that damn fictional reporter comes back.

(And what section of the library does the librarian put such a book, in fiction or non-fiction?)
As to why he found it necessary to use a fictional reporter, I suspect that since the year 1955 was over 50 years ago, maybe his journalistic career wasn't yet developed enough at that point for him to go and interview the big time Indy racers that the book is about, though I think Yates was publishing books while he was still in his 20s.