AND they're off! Media moguls hungry to profit from the misery of the Madoff scandal's victims have started the race to tell his story.

Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins has signed up the world rights to a book about the fraudster to be written by TV political hack Andrew Kirtzman.

Random House has also snapped up a Madoff book, to be written by investigative reporter Richard Behar. Both will be on the shelves in 2010.

In the scramble to make the movie, presumably Steven Spielberg has first dibs, given that one of his charities is among the list of Madoff clients. His co-founder at DreamWorks Animation, Jeffrey Katzenberg, also lost millions of dollars, so maybe they could make a Shrek-style cartoon version. No happy endings in this one, though.

* BUT is anyone going to bring the tale of Love Guv Eliot Spitzer's annus horribilis to the silver screen? The former scourge of Wall Street lost his job as New York Governor after being caught consorting with prostitutes in March. Now it emerges he too lost big money to Madoff. You could almost feel sorry for him.

* THEY are asking what “due diligence” Arkie Busson did on Bernie Madoff's funds before he committed $230 million of his EIM Group's clients' money. Which is a decent question — especially as EIM's motto is True Diligence.

* GOLLY. Harry Markopolos, the investor who had been calling Madoff a fraud for years, trained in “unconventional warfare” as a reservist in the Army and, according to the Wall Street Journal, came to “consider Madoff a domestic enemy”.

* MORE Madoff. A submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission dated November 2005 and entitled The World's Largest Hedge Fund is a Fraud warned: “As a result of this case, several careers on Wall Street and in Europe will be ruined.” Indeed.

* IT'S not been a good couple of weeks for publishers. Several are understood to have lost big money in the collapse of Woolworths because the retailer owned one of the big book wholesalers (one major house is rumoured to have lost well over £1 million, having blithely continued to supply books to Woolies). Just to make things worse, there was a technical hitch at one of the country's biggest bookshops, the Hatchards next to Piccadilly Circus, when the tills refused to work for the first 50 minutes of trading. In one of the busiest weeks for book sales, it could hardly have come at a worse time.

* A QUALITY letter in the Daily Telegraph from hack-turned-City spinner Damien McCrystal, formerly of this parish, defending the right of people aged between 55 and 64 to get drunk: “Those are the magic years when mortgages and school fees are behind you, but your health and recovery abilities are still fairly robust. There is no particular reason not to drink a great deal.”