KEY POINTS:
Talk about life imitating art. Hannibal, the third in the ongoing series of novels (all of which have been made into movies) about the thinking person's serial killer, Dr Hannibal Lechter, features a character who breeds man-eating pigs.
Now as the latest instalment, Hannibal Rising, hits the bookstores and movie theatres, a Canadian pig farmer goes on trial charged with murdering prostitutes and feeding their body parts to his herd.
These are heady times for those fascinated by serial killers. In December, the so-called Suffolk Strangler dispatched five prostitutes in a fortnight, a spree that drew parallels with Jack the Ripper (five in 11 weeks).
The farmer accused of killing 26 prostitutes (and suspected of killing twice that number) allegedly preyed at a much more leisurely pace, spreading his crimes over almost 20 years. For most of that time Vancouver police insisted there was no strong reason to believe a serial killer was working the desperately seedy red-light district known as Low Track.
Sure, hookers were disappearing at regular intervals but their bodies weren't turning up. Now they know why.
This month, the remains of 17 children and young women were discovered in the drain of a villa in a smart New Delhi suburb.
Over the past two years almost 40 people have disappeared from a nearby slum area and, as in Vancouver, the police have been accused of refusing to draw the obvious conclusion and act on it because the missing persons were fringe-dwellers - slum kids and drug-addicted street walkers - whose dematerialisation had no ripple effect on the placid pond of mainstream society.
In America cops use "taxpayer" to differentiate between murder cases that need urgent attention and those that don't.
The fascination with real and fictional serial killers derives from the fact that they are the last monsters, our unsuperstitious and scientifically enlightened age's equivalent of vampires, werewolves, creatures from the black lagoon, and things that go bump in the night.
Like them, serial killers don't have a motive for doing what they do - they respond to opportunity and the urgings of their deformed natures - so no one is safe. Unlike them, serial killers do exist.
Nothing illustrates the serial killer's hold on contemporary consciousness better than Hannibal the Cannibal's emergence as a pop-cultural icon. In 1981's Red Dragon he was a malign but largely unseen presence who egged on the killer from his prison cell.
In The Silence of the Lambs (1988) he moves centre stage, assisting - and toying with - the heroine, FBI agent Clarice Starling, and earning the reader's guilty admiration for his piercing psychological insight and ingenious escape.
As the title suggests, Hannibal (1999) completes Lechter's transition from support act to star of the show. This is not a matter of interpretation; author Thomas Harris' intentions couldn't be clearer. Lechter's galactic intellect and exquisite taste are worshipfully dwelt on while the happy ending - Hannibal and Clarice settling down in ecstatic cohabitation - is surely the ultimate in authorial approval. Greater love hath no writer than this, that he lay down his heroine for his anti-hero.
Incidentally, by having Starling fall for Hannibal, Harris is placing his creation in a direct line of descent from Count Dracula. The classic vampire story has two linked themes: it's a rape/seduction fantasy that speaks to the repressed society's most twisted fixation - that once a girl gets a taste for it, she can't get enough.
It is no accident that the vampire sub-genre shares these themes with pornography. Horror's raison d'etre, like that of pornography, is titillation. Because their potency is measured by the degree of arousal they generate, both are obliged to push the boundaries of explicitness and abnormality.
It is sobering to reflect that the last cultural icon to rise from the pages of crime fiction was the wise-cracking private eye with a .38 Special and a fifth of scotch in his bottom drawer.
In his essay The Simple Art of Murder Raymond Chandler explained where his hero Philip Marlowe was, as they say, coming from: "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He must be a man of honour." Elsewhere, Chandler defined the "emotional basis" of the hard-boiled crime story thus: "It does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done - unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done."
Sixty years on, the hottest ticket in the genre is himself a mass murderer - and a towering snob to boot - while Marlowe, a "shop-soiled Sir Galahad", seems as anachronistic as a Knight of the Round Table and his code seems as quaint as bicycle clips. How did it come to this? How did a cannibalistic sociopath usurp the man of honour?
Hannibal's pin-up status suggests that we've breezed past the point at which the line between right and wrong is a little blurred into a squalid region where evil is glamorized and moral relativism rules. If this is indeed where mass entertainment resides in the 21st century, what does that say about the consumers?
