Did you hear the news?

In the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s  demise, a great rush is on to fill the void in the title international boogey-man number one. Rumors that Muammar Gaddafi is eager to reclaim the top spot were met with anger from the likes of Kim Jong Il who seemed to feel that he was unjustly consigned to Mr. Bin Laden’s shadow during his prime and a little long in the tooth to occupy the slot now that it’s open. But the more pressing question for the fiction and film community, (alright, for me), is what’s going to happen to the myth?

What about the works of popular culture centered around the legend of the the bearded one, (not Fidel Castro) how will they survive, what will they be remembered as and has their relevance been immediately snuffed out? I hope not.

Which is not to suggest that I wish the man were still at large, it's just that I like to have a shroud of secrecy surround my villains. Let's face it, Darth Vader was a lot more menacing before we saw him as a toe-headed boy on Tatooine and when The X-Files gave the Smoking Man a complete background? Kinda took the air out of his image, no? And did anybody really like Hannibal Rising? Plenty of Bin Laden's life is a matter of public record and put together nicely by scholars, but when he was just floating out there in our collective subconscious, man that was some good fodder for fabulists.

Remember when the revolutionary/terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez or ‘Carlos The Jackal’ was captured in the early nineties and put the kibosh on that particular literary goldmine? William Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal was inspired by him and Robert Ludlum's entire Bourne series featured him as a shadowy nemesis (notice his complete absence from the post-cold-war films), but man he was a fantastic true-life figure to which wild speculation could be applied and sound solid. The more we learn about him as flesh and blood the less juicy his biography reads, (though, I'm terribly excited to check out Olivier Assayas' Carlos on DVD - something in depth, dramatic and fresh - recapturing the lightening in a bottle that was The Baader Meinhof Complex? - I hope so).

So who will fill the void? Whose name can be dropped however casually to underscore the level of evil of the nefarious plot of the week? What figure's shadow can we pencil into the backdrop of books, TV shows and films to automatically raise the stakes and invest the reader/viewer immediately? Whose villainy can the left and the right of our deeply polarized society unite behind stamping out while simultaneously reveling in exploiting for entertainment?

My short list of nominees include three pop singers and an Oscar winning director... I've got to aim higher. Who're yours?

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.