Thomas Harris

• Born: 1940
• Place of Birth: Jackson, Tennessee

TYPES OF PLOT: Master sleuth; police procedural; psychological; horror; inverted

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Hannibal Lecter, 1981-

Contribution

Thomas Harris excels in three areas: psychological insight into his characters, details of crime and crime detection (including suspect profiling), and a style that is accessible yet finely crafted and impressive in its thematic and original imagery. Because of this combination, his books are exceedingly popular and more widely respected than many in the detective and mystery genres.

Serial killers appeared in fiction before Harris’s novels, but as David Sexton notes, before Red Dragon, “none had been so closely modeled about what was known” about real serial killers. Harris studied the work of Robert Ressler, who originated criminal profiling, and John Douglas; both worked in the FBI’s behavioral science unit, which Harris visited as early as 1978. The portrait of the FBI and profiling in Harris’s books is so positive that many critics believe Harris even affected popular ideas concerning real serial killers, the menace they present, and the best methods for apprehending them.

Certainly, many crime novels concerning serial killers would not have been written, or at least not have taken the shape they have, without Harris’s novels. In addition, the film The Silence of the Lambs (1991), based on Harris's book of the same name, transformed serial-killer films and provided new realism and depth of characterization instead of the nearly supernatural villains and endless interchangeable victims of slasher films. Ironically, Harris’s most famous creation, Hannibal Lecter, is not a realistic serial killer, but a popculture icon who has been compared to Dracula and Mr. Hyde.

Biography

Little has been published about Thomas Harris’s life, which he carefully keeps private. Even the month and day of his birth do not appear in any published accounts. However, he is no hermit. Those who know him—including his mother, with whom he is close—say that Harris is a southern gentleman, a good friend, and a gourmet cook.

Born to William Harris and Polly Harris, Thomas Harris is an only child. He was raised primarily in Rich, Mississippi, near his birthplace, Jackson, Tennessee. As an adolescent, Harris was bookish; he read constantly. After attending Clarksdale High School and Cleveland High School, Harris left Mississippi for Baylor College in Waco, Texas.

While earning his bachelor’s degree in English from 1961 to 1964, Harris began writing professionally. He covered crime stories for the Waco Herald-Tribune and was eventually hired as a full-time reporter. One assignment took him to Mexico to investigate a child prostitution ring. He also began having pieces published in the magazines True and Argosy. No sources have tracked down those pieces or even established whether they were short stories or true-crime reports. Given the histories of the magazines, the latter is likelier. At Baylor, Harris married a fellow student, Harriet. They had one daughter, Anne, and were divorced by 1964. After graduation, Harris traveled throughout Europe. He moved to New York City in 1968 to work for Associated Press as a reporter, covering crime, and then as an editor.

In 1973, Harris and coworkers Sam Maull and Dick Riley conceived the novel that would become Black Sunday (1975). They were inspired by acts of terrorism committed in 1972 at the Lod Airport in Tel Aviv by the Japanese Red Army, supported by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and at the Munich Olympics by the Black September Organization. All three men conducted research and began writing; the advance was split three ways. However, Harris made financial arrangements with his cowriters and continued the project alone. The novel received mixed reviews but became a bestseller. A film of the novel, directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring Bruce Dern as a terrorist, appeared in 1977. Encouraged by the book’s reception, Harris left the Associated Press in 1974 to write novels full time.

When Harris’s father was ill in the mid-1980s, Harris returned to Mississippi for eighteen months. He connects Red Dragon, dedicated to his father, to that time. When Putnam published the novel in 1981, Harris was living in Italy. This novel was filmed in 1986 as Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann and featuring William Petersen, later of the television show CSI (began in 2000), as Will Graham. The film was financially unsuccessful but garnered a loyal following for Harris.

Harris worked slowly and carefully. His third novel, The Silence of the Lambs (1988), sold well and garnered positive reviews from major periodicals. In 1989, it won the Anthony Award (from the World Mystery Convention), World Fantasy Award (World Fantasy Convention), and Stoker Award (Horror Writers’ Association of America) for the year’s best novel. The film adaptation fully established the reputation of an already popular writer. Released by Orion Pictures in 1991, it earned $272.7 million and saved the company from bankruptcy. Also, it was only the third film to win five major Academy Awards: best director (Jonathan Demme), best actress (Jodie Foster), best actor (Anthony Hopkins), best adapted screenplay (), and best picture.

Harris reportedly did not want to write another book featuring Hannibal Lecter, but Delacorte published Hannibal in 1999. Despite mixed-to-negative reviews, it became a best seller and was nominated as best novel for the 2000 Bram Stoker Awards. In 2001, the film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Anthony Hopkins, earned $351.7 million worldwide and set a record for opening receipts for an R-rated film. Harris allowed the screenplay to change the book’s ending; still, many critics found the result too gruesome and morally upsetting, and Jodie Foster declined the role of Clarice Starling, which went to Julianne Moore. Brett Ratner directed a new film based on Red Dragon, released in 2002 under that name, featuring Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

In 2004, Harris signed a contract with Bantam to write two books for an eight-figure sum. The first, Hannibal Rising, was released in December 2006, when production had already begun on the 2007 film, directed by Peter Webber and starring Gaspard Ulliel as young Hannibal.

In 2019, after a forty-four year hiatus, Harris published Cari Mora, a thriller novel set between Miami and Columbia about a young woman who finds herself mixed up with a human trafficker. Only his second novel to not feature Hannibal Lecter, Cari Mora received mixed reviews with some critics arguing that if it were not for Harris's name on the cover, the book would have gone unnoticed.

Analysis

Thomas Harris’s first three novelsBlack Sunday, Red Dragon, and The Silence of the Lambs—share many characteristics with each other and with standard thrillers or crime novels; however, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, although they still contain some traditional elements of the genre, are shaped by having a charming sociopathic cannibal as the protagonist. Harris’s second and third books have strong elements of police procedurals, featuring fingerprinting (including off a corpse’s eyeball), an autopsy, and serotyping.

In the first three novels, the protagonist is a government agent, motivated by human concern and duty to ferociously uphold the law, although the agent is still an outsider. Black Sunday features Major David Kabakov of Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, who tracks the Palestinian terrorists to the United States, where he alienates American law enforcers because of not only his insightfulness but also his ruthlessness. Red Dragon features Will Graham, a peacefully retired FBI agent called back into reluctant temporary service to stop a serial killer. The Silence of the Lambs features Clarice Starling, a student at the FBI Academy who becomes central to stopping another serial killer. Graham and Kabakov embrace their ability to stop murder but grapple painfully with the costs to themselves and others. Starling is a woman in a man’s world, angry but not yet melancholy as Graham and Kabakov are—perhaps one reason the book was more successful.

However, while the perspectives and values of law enforcement agencies are firmly upheld in these novels, the criminal antagonists are drawn convincingly and with sympathy. All their crimes are portrayed as the result of their having been hurt, though also of how they have chosen to react to those hurts. Black Sunday really has two antagonists: Michael Lander, an American veteran and prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, and Dahlia Iyad, part Mata Hari and part an early example of Harris’s strong female characters. Francis Dolarhyde in Red Dragon compels both compassion and revulsion, as he struggles with his last chance to love a living woman instead of having sex only with the dead. Jame Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs is pitiful but less developed. This is partly because, as the novel says, he is defined by “a sort of total lack that he wants to fill” and treats others like things. It is also because Hannibal Lecter overshadows him.

In the first two Lecter novels, Harris portrays Lecter as an unsympathetic character and discourages readers’ empathy. In response to Starling’s questions, Lecter himself says, “Nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences. [. . .] You’ve got everybody in moral dignity pants—nothing is ever anybody’s fault.” In Hannibal, this changes. Hannibal shows Starling cut free from the FBI after a scandal and the death of Jack Crawford. Soon, she no longer provides the legal perspective that condemns Lecter as a monster. Moreover, Lecter is surrounded by worse monsters, including Mason Verger, a rich sexual deviant who literally drinks the tears of children in his martini. The major law officer, Police Commissioner Rinaldo Pazzi, of Florence, Italy, decides to take Verger’s bribe and deliver Lecter to the rich man for his private vengeance but is killed by Lecter. In a complete reversal for Harris, this police officer compels both compassion for his situation and revulsion at his choices.

Moreover, in Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, Harris reveals why Hannibal Lecter became a serial killer: The privileged son of Eastern European nobility, the young Lecter endured the horrors of World War II’s Eastern Front, including the cannibalization of his younger sister Mischa by opportunistic soldiers. Hannibal Rising actually contradicts earlier descriptions of Lecter’s childhood. For example, Red Dragon mentions his childhood cruelty to animals, while in Hannibal Rising this is absent, and he is almost saccharinely sweet to his old horse.

Interestingly, although Hannibal Rising follows the general approach of the first novel in the series and gives Lecter unlikable characters to kill, it also reintroduces the legal perspective of the earlier books. Inspector Pascal Popil is willing to work with young Lecter, partly out of love for his literally fabulous stepmother, Lady Murasaki, and partly because the war has left him with a less stable sense of morality, but he sees Lecter as Crawford, Graham, and Starling do, as a monster.

Black Sunday

When Black Sunday was published in 1974, many found the idea of a major terrorist attack on United States soil too unbelievable. Even David Sexton’s The Strange World of Thomas Harris (2001) says the novel is “of its time and no more” and not truly frightening. However, after September 11, 2001, the novel’s premise became more plausible and chilling. In Black Sunday, an insane American joins with terrorists to explode the Aldrich blimp, which films the Super Bowl, to kill everyone present, including the United States president. The novel also shows American ambivalence about the Vietnam War and fears about the mental state of the returning veterans.

Red Dragon

Red Dragon portrays Harris’s best criminal, Frances Dolarhyde, a man who thinks of himself as deformed (despite corrective surgery) and finds families to kill by the home movies they send to be processed at the lab where he works. The novel introduces Harris’s theme of metamorphosis, as Dolarhyde wants the killings to bring about his Becoming, a transmutation into the superhuman Red Dragon, named for the watercolor by , The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. When Dolarhyde meets and begins to love a strong, independent blind woman, Reba McClane, he has to struggle with his alter ego not to kill her.

The Silence of the Lambs

While the details of FBI procedure are sketchy in Red Dragon, they are copious and realistic in The Silence of the Lambs, from scenes at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to depictions of the agency’s work with local police departments. Though Harris is accused of painting too positive a picture of the FBI, he does depict the bureau’s sexism and rigid yet politically opportunistic hierarchy. Serial killer Jame Gumb, who kills obese women to make a suit of their skins, is partially based on Ed Gein, an actual murderer in Wisconsin. Gumb’s character has raised complaints from activists representing transgender people, though the book establishes that Gumb is not a true transgender person. Still, Gumb’s wishes and his raising of death’s head hawkmoths continue Harris’s theme of transformation. Moreover, Gumb’s plan and the efforts of protagonist Clarice Starling to fit into the male-oriented FBI develop themes of gender in the book.

Hannibal and Hannibal Rising

Many readers have found Hannibal and Hannibal Rising disappointing, though these books have enthusiastic fans. Some of those fans see the end of Hannibal, in which Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter live together as lovers, as a tale in which Beauty tames the Beast. However, the Beast has already fed Beauty the brains of a member of the Department of Justice, which, partly still influenced by Lecter’s drugs and hypnotism, Starling enjoyed. In many ways, Hannibal undermines all the values supported in The Silence of the Lambs: the FBI, law, and mercy rather than murder. The book is also highly elitist, inviting readers to identify with Lecter’s wealth and taste and withhold their condemnation as he kills and eats “free-range rude.” Hannibal Rising is equally elitist, especially concerning Lecter’s life in Paris. More successfully, it shows the growth of Lecter’s macabre interests through medicine as well as murder.

Principal Series Characters:

• Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, plays a minor but key role in the first two books of the series and dominates the third and fourth. Lecter combines elements of Sherlock Holmes and Holmes’s nemesis Dr. Moriarty. In the beginning of the series, Lecter, who is imprisoned, advises Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) instructor Will Graham and then FBI trainee Clarice Starling on their cases; he also secretly advises another killer to exterminate Graham’s whole family and provides the murderer with the necessary information. Lecter’s brilliance and remorseless intensity are directed against many adversaries with whom the readers cannot sympathize, reducing revulsion at Lecter’s actions. Lecter is cultured, dryly humorous, and without conscience.
• Jack Crawford, an FBI official, connects the books and represents the law-and-order perspective that guides them. He is a mentor to the protagonists; he regrets putting them in danger, physical or psychological, but is realistic and even manipulative. In The Silence of the Lambs (1988), he is section chief of the behavioral science unit; his exact title is unclear in Red Dragon (1981).

Bibliography

Achenbach, Joel. “Hannibal Author Thomas Harris, Toasting the Pleasures of the Flesh but Unwilling to Press It.” The Washington Post, June 32, 1999, p. C01.

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. New York: Random House, 2007.

Caputi, Jane. “American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction.” Journal of American Culture 16, no. 4 (Winter, 1993): 101.

Ditum, Sarah. “Cari Mora by Thomas Harris Review – Hannibal Lecter's Creator Returns.” The Guardian, 16 May 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/16/cari-mora-by-thomas-harris-review. Accessed 24 July 2024.

Fuller, Stephen M. “Deposing an American Cultural Totem: Clarice Starling and Postmodern Heroism in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal.” Journal of Popular Culture 38, no. 5 (August, 2005): 819-833.

Jenkins, Phillip. Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1994.

Magistrale, Tony. “Transmogrified Gothic: The Novels of Thomas Harris.” A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.

Sexton, David. The Strange World of Thomas Harris. London: Short Books, 2001.