Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction

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 Sample Author Entry

 

Thomas Harris (1940 - )

Harris is the author of five crime thrillers, each of which has been successfully adapted to film: Black Sunday, RED DRAGON, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising. The last four of these involve the notorious serial killer Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, who has become a pop-culture icon. 

     Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee, but lived in several parts of Mississippi while growing up.  His mother was a high-school biology teacher.  Harris majored in English Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, graduating in 1964.  As an undergraduate, he covered the crime beat part-time for the local newspaper.  Harris went on to work for the Associated Press in New York from 1968-74, sometimes covering stories in Mexico.  He now divides his time between New York, Florida, and Mississippi.  Harris keeps a low public profile, and very little is known about his personal life. 

     In order to research his Lecter novels, Harris visited the FBI’s famed Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Quantico, Virginia several times during the 1980s.  He met practicing criminal profilers there, and was given access to the case files of actual serial killers such as Edmund Kemper, Richard Chase, and Ed Gein.  Robert Ressler, a former FBI profiler who was responsible on one occasion for showing Harris around the BSU, claims to have introduced the author to the sole female agent then working for the organization.  If this is true, this agent may have helped to form the basis for the character Clarice Starling in Harrris’ third novel (Simpson 71).  

     Black Sunday, Harris’ first novel, was published in 1975.  Inspired by the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, it involves a plot by an agent of the Palestine Liberation Organization and an unhinged Vietnam veteran to crash a blimp into the Super Bowl.  Red Dragon (1981) introduces Hannibal Lecter, an exceptionally cultured psychiatrist and serial killer who assists the investigator Will Graham in tracking a disfigured killer named Francis Dolarhyde.  The Silence of the Lambs (1988), generally considered Harris’ best novel, deepens Lecter’s story, as the gifted but deranged inmate of the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane is called upon by rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling to help in another serial killer investigation.  Hannibal (1999) takes place seven years after the previous novel, and sees Lecter free, having escaped the confines of the hospital.  He is pursued by FBI Special Agent Starling, as well as by one of his former victims, who is now bent on revenge and would like to feed his nemesis to a herd of boars he has raised for the purpose. 

     Harris is known for his gripping plots, terrifying and ornate scenes of carnage, occasional moments of black comedy, and an extraordinary attention to detail in descriptions of forensic procedures.  Among the most recurrent themes in his work is the disturbing affinity between violent criminals and the ostensibly normal.  Hannibal Lecter’s key message to those who seek his help is that the line separating the law-abiding from the grossly criminal, the civilized from the barbaric, is disturbingly hard to maintain.  What makes it difficult for those who encounter Lecter to dismiss him as merely a quack is his superior intellect, which like his physical strength is of almost superhuman proportions.  Such gifts are common to Harris’ killers, who are often constructed as monstrous aesthetes intent on using the bodies of their victims to express grotesque personal visions.  Also prominent in Harris’ writing is a meticulous exploration of the techniques employed by experts to profile and capture deviant individuals.  Well-versed in the specifics of law-enforcement procedures, the author often makes these procedures essential to his plots.  

     Harris has been extraordinarily prescient in terms of his subject matter.  Black Sunday offers the first fictional treatment of a terrorist attack involving an Islamic extremist on American ground, while Red Dragon (1981) was in the vanguard of popular interest in serial killers and criminal profilers.  As Philip L. Simpson remarks,

It is little exaggeration to say that Thomas Harris, for all practical purposes, created the current formula for mainstream serial killer fiction back in 1981 with the publication of Red Dragon.  His 1988 follow-up, The Silence of the Lambs, solidified the formula (controlling Gothic tone, two killers, a dark and troubled law-enforcement outsider in uneasy alliance with a murderer) and ensured his status as the foremost writer of serial killer fiction.  (70)   

Countless other fiction writers, as well as television dramas such as Profiler and the CSI franchise, have been heavily influenced by Harris’ memorable representations of criminals and those who hunt them. 

     Anthony Hopkins’ representation of Lecter in three wildly successful films has secured the character’s prominent and enduring place in pop culture.  The film version of The Silence of the Lambs, starring Hopkins and Jodie Foster, appeared in 1991 and went on to garner five Academy Awards.  Hannibal, released in 2001, was also a commercial success, with Julianne Moore taking on the role of Starling.  Red Dragon, which had been filmed under the title Manhunter in 1986, appeared in 2002 and starred Ed Norton.

 

- Geoff Hamilton

 

 

         Bibliography

 

Harris, Thomas. Hannibal Rising: New York: Delacourt Press, 2006.

---.  Hannibal. New York: Dell Publishing, 2000.

---.  The Silence of the Lambs. New York: St. Martins, 1991.

---. Red Dragon. 1981. New York: Dell Publishing, 1990.

Simpson, Philip.  Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through

     Contemporary American Film and Fiction.  Carbondale: Southern 

     Illinois UP, 2000.

 

 

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