Robert Knott, who took over writing the late Robert B. Parker’s Western series, has no trouble cooking up larger-than-life characters to populate the books.The author, whose second outing with Marshal Virgil Cole and Deputy Everett Hitch is Bull River (out Tuesday), merely lifts traits from the colorful men he worked with during his younger years as a roughneck.“There were self-taught geniuses, outlaws, do-gooders, lazy bums and funny-as-hell hicks, all mixed together,” Knott says in press materials.