Hitmen are hot. Ain’t it always the way? You can never find a well dressed, cold blooded killer when you need one, then half a dozen all come along at once. We’ve already had John Travolta and Samuel Jackson in matching suits and guns in Pulp Fiction, and we can look forward (or not) to seeing Jean Rochefort as an anally retentive Gallic hit man in Wild Target (see review), Sylvester Stallone as an explosives expert for hire in The Specialist, Tim Roth as a Russian paid assassin in Little Odessa, Anthony Paglia as a romantically inclined contract killer in, uh, Killer, and Jean Leno reprising his role as Nikita’s cleaner (that’s cleaning up people not carpets) in Luc Besson’s Leon.

It has always struck me as ridiculously easy to hire a hit man in a movie. You just pick up the phone, dial a number and hey presto, Charles Bronson is on the other end of the line agreeing a fee to wipe out everyone who ever so much as irritated you. Jeremy Beadle? This’ll wipe the smirk off his face. Kenneth Branagh? The ham is dead meat. Chris De Burgh? It won’t just be the lady in red. But where do you get the hit man’s number? I mean, he can hardly put an advert in the Yellow Pages, right there between Historic Buildings and Hobby Shops: Gun For Hire. Is there someone in your life you’d rather wasn’t? Spouses slaughtered; mothers murdered; father’s fried; partners pickled; neighbour’s knackered. Political personalities a speciality. Discount rates for massacres. Our motto: “We aim to please!” Dial M for Free Estimates and Advice. (No major credit cards accepted. All payments in small denomination used bills)

Of course, hits do take place (the murder of Martin Cahill being a recent example). The preferred method seems to involve two men and a motorcycle, close range shots to the head, its all over in seconds and since the victim is usually as big a crook as his (or her) killers the only person who seems unduly put out is the man who has to get the blood off the sidewalk. If you belong to the mafia, a paramilitary terrorist army or any large criminal fraternity, it is probably not that hard to make the necessary arrangements. But the rest of us have to make do as we can.

Which is usually not very well. The police intercept a good deal of planned amateur hits before they take place, because the person doing the hiring has to go around asking people if they know anyone who would be prepared to commit murder, a conversation point that is quite likely to attract attention. And even if you do find yourself a killer, he’s unlikely to be Charles Bronson, armed to his false teeth and adept in the etiquette of murder. When I was researching a story on murder some years ago, a senior British policeman told me, “There are obviously people who would kill other people for money. But most of the time they really aren’t the brightest people alive.”

Police in Britain were initially baffled by the assassination of a housewife last year, until they realised that the hit man had called at the wrong house, and had actually intended to murder her neighbour (over some East European political dispute). And a case currently taking place in London involves a New Zealand student who was paid to shoot a man in hospital. She carried out the murder in cold blooded fashion, then felt so bad about it she went and told the police who immediately arrested the men who paid her. You just can’t get good help these days.

Mind you, the money’s not that good either. In the movies, the hit men live in such lavish style one can only assume they are either on at least half a million per corpse of they are independently wealthy and just doing it for kicks. Back in the real world, there have been cases of murders being carried out for under a hundred pounds. Of course, that kind of money doesn’t buy a lot of silence, and the figures only come out when all the participants wind up in court. The New Zealand student claimed she did it for the price of a mobile home (about £7,000) although the first time I read the report I thought she had said mobile phone, which would at least have been more use to her in jail.

I once interviewed a clinical psychopath who, having murdered his ex-girlfriend (for no money, and no particular reason), began to think of himself as a killer for hire and agreed to participate in a contract killing for the princely sum of £1800, split two ways. The fact that the interview took place in a maximum security prison shows how successful he was in his new profession. Their victim was a simple minded waiter who was suspected by the drug dealing owner of a restaurant of ripping him off. The psycho and an accomplice (against whom the case collapsed) picked up the waiter in a car, and drove him off to a house in the country. The plan was to dispose of him there, but the waiter, suspecting the worst, put up a fight and wound up being beaten with a baseball bat and stabbed a number of times in the back of the car. When they got to the country some hours later, the killers realised their victim was actually still alive, and spent the next ten minutes strangling him. They disposed of the body in lime, then went home and had bleach baths in order to remove all forensic evidence (and presumably most of their skin). Yet despite the complete absence of a body, the police got a successful conviction. Why? Because the killer was a psycho, and having completed his first hit went around boasting about it to anybody who would listen.

I suppose it is like anything, if you want a job done properly, you just have to do it yourself. I think Jeremy, Ken and Chris can continue to sleep peacefully at night.