“If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted,” Dostoevsky wrote in a better and longer book than Red Dragon. But of course, they’re getting inside his, as well. He’s someone cursed with the ability to empathize with monsters. Graham, unlike in some screen adaptations, isn’t a buffoon or a monster himself. What he does in Red Dragon is humanize a serial killer in a discomfiting, awful, fascinating way. It’s a little sad that the legacy of Thomas Harris resides with Lector, and that his work normalized serial killers. What Dolarhyde does later in the book, involving the William Blake painting The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun, blew my mind when I read it decades ago, and is still an insane delight. Your heart breaks for him…not to the point where what he does is forgivable, or even understandable. “Try to say ‘grandmother,’” Brother Buddy said. The Tooth Fairy is a sick and monstrous creation that you nevertheless grow to understand a little bit-which makes him all the more frightening. Graham piecing together how the Tooth Fairy chooses victims is logical and inspired.īut the book belongs to Dolarhyde, with his Grandmother’s snaggletoothed dentures, his Gothic childhood, his brief happy romance with the blind Reba McClane (a great character in her own right). Lector’s advice (“Have you seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black”) is sinister without seeming supernatural. The forensic details are expertly deployed. The book was made into a great Michael Mann film ( Manhunter), a well-cast but underwhelming Brett Ratner film, and the third season of Hannibal. Noir omnibus) and impressed Ian Rankin (“I was in thrall to Thomas Harris” from a Daily Mail interview).īy now, much of Red Dragon has become cliche-the killer behind bars assisting the detectives, the serial killer with a sad past, the intrepid cop who’s a little too similar to the people he’s chasing. Red Dragon is a book that daunted James Ellroy (“the greatest suspense novel ever written,” he wrote in the intro to his L.A. Will Graham and Francis Dolarhyde commanded my imagination. I didn’t much care about Lector, and reading Red Dragon, I cared even less. Hannibal Lector was a part of the culture by then, parodied in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon One among other places. I sought out Thomas Harris’s book immediately.

It’s a breathless sentence, a Hemingway-esque concatenation of short words and direct actions.

Red dragon thomas harris