Baddies in books: Hannibal Lecter, magnetic and unhinged

Cannibal psychopath he may be, but Lecter feeds our hungry fantasies of being singled out by a hyperintelligent outsider

• From Mrs Danvers to General Woundwort: Baddies in books

In the novel Hannibal, a now world-weary and disgraced Clarice Starling is sent by corrupt FBI officials on the fool’s errand of attempting to trace the whereabouts of literature’s most famous cannibal. As part of that process, she interviews Mrs Rosenkranz, a guest at the most infamous of Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalistic banquets, who tells her that Lecter “made a girl’s fur crackle”.

Those words are not a little disturbing, but it’s hard to deny that Lecter has a magnetism greater than that of most other villains – just look at all the fan fiction he has inspired. When I was on Mastermind, a few years ago, I took “the Hannibal Lecter novels” as my specialist subject. John Humphrys asked “is Hannibal Lecter the Huggy Bear of criminals?”

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