Furthermore, should fictional narrative be obliged to represent only characters whose behaviour is worthy of emulation, we'd be stuck with pretty piss-poor entertainment. Scene after scene, numbingly virtuous paragons would visit the sick, recycle their yogurt pots and rescue cats from trees. Alas, most compelling plots involve some sort of badness. Had Dostoevsky taken my agent's advice, Raskolnikov would have only taken that old hag a basket of fresh muffins, in terror that some unoriginal ne'er-do-well reader might do something untoward with an axe. We'd have no genre of crime fiction; benevolence fiction would be all the rage.

But then, Griffiths has been studying criminology at Bradford and most of the role models lauded on his website were biographical: Jack the Ripper or Fred and Rosemary West. With no Kevin, any "Crossbow Cannibal" could find inspiration aplenty in the real world.

For the biggest problem isn't that we writers concoct all these dreadful plots in our twisted minds that corrupt our audiences with visions of wickedness when otherwise our kindly cultural consumers would have tip-toed through the tulips and picked bouquets for grandma. On the contrary, novelists and screenwriters have the damnedest time competing with the evening news, many of whose stories are vastly more horrible than anything our midget imaginations could make up. Where did I get the idea of a high-school massacre in the first place? From the newspaper. From a long line of self-pitying, pretentious boys who took their unhappiness out on unsuspecting classmates in a spectacular fashion. Life doesn't imitate art; art imitates life — rather pallidly, in most instances. So if anyone should be suing anyone, I should be suing the estate of those Columbine kids, or even, in the event of his conviction, Stephen Griffiths — for infecting my plodding, placid, uninventive brain with unthinkable ideas.