More importantly, the book disappoints by not looking beyond a fascination with the story's central characters. It fails to locate the thread that links Fred and Rosemary, their fantasies and their actions, to people like you and me.The Wests remain monsters, outsiders, not a challenge to our own personal thinking. From there he roamed, wooing, cajoling and coercing hundreds of women into fulfilling his fantasies. He could charm the authorities with his inoffensiveness: before his jail suicide, even his prison officers were photographed joking with him. Good old Fred, what a laugh.There was nothing - including murder - that West could not get away with. And he encountered two key women, his first wife, Rena (a prostitute whom he eventually murdered) and Rose West, each of whom also suffered abusive upbringings and had fantasies he had never even imagined. But the role of the Official Solicitor in Wansell's book - providing access to West's own 100-page "autobiography" - leaves a nasty taste.

Consideration for the relatives of his victims requires that we are offered more than a state-sponsored freak show.However, to be fair, Wansell's book has its virtues. It delivers a well-documented account of how this mass killer was created; a grim, unglamorous read. An admittedly secretive person himself, Wansell relentlessly pursues the truth through the haze of West's many deceptions.It is the story of a young Frederick West, sexually initiated and beaten by his mother in a family where incest was accepted practice. Likewise, Inside 25 Cromwell St, written by West's children, Stephen and Mae, did not prompt debate about the fate of the proceeds. In short, the details of this horror story have been sold for profit by an arm of the law; the very institution that put the serial killer behind bars.Such a bizarre arrangement puts it into a different category to accounts of criminal's lives.

Howard Marks, the drug smuggler, has just published his autobiography but his consequent profit from crime has not provoked outcry. For such a book still to be worthwhile, this writer - a well-regarded but undistinguished biographer of Cary Grant, Sir James Goldsmith and Terence Rattigan - would have to tell us something very special. There is another doubt about the Wansell book. It has been commissioned by the State - by the Official Solicitor - expressly to raise money for West's children. It is the latest such book and follows copious reporting of Rosemary West's trial and conviction for 10 murders including the killing of her daughter and stepdaughter. Blair is one of those maddeningly rational politicians of a kind which Gaitskell kept saying he was but wasn't. It may be that this is appropriate to the minimalist and politically unemotional present day.