That’s the same atrocious aftershave you wore in court.
This is how Dr. Hannibal Lecter first greets FBI profiler Will Graham in Thomas Harris’ 1981 thriller Red Dragon, his readers’ introduction to both creations. In this mere line we have the cheekiness, the refined diction, the preternatural sense of smell linked to the preternatural memory, the sybarite’s snobbery. Dr. Lecter lies on a cot with his copy of Dumas’ Le Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine; Will had thought him asleep until he spoke. In court, he had the satisfaction of seeing Dr. Lecter sentenced and sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where they now meet. The investigation of Lecter’s crimes left Will physically and psychically wounded, and then in an early retirement in Marathon, Florida, with wife Molly and stepson Willy. But as Red Dragon begins the FBI is investigating the murders of two families on the consecutive nights of full moons, one in Birmingham, Alabama and and one in Atlanta, Georgia. Agent Jack Crawford, who like Dr. Lecter is to reappear in the sequel The Silence of the Lambs (1988), talks Will into taking on this new case and finding this killer who has come to be called the “Tooth Fairy” for the bite marks he leaves on his victims. Dr. Lecter, because or although insane, might have some useful thoughts on the psycho’s motivations and plans.
Harris notes early on that Will mimics the speech of the person he’s talking to without realizing. This is part of a sympathetic tendency which gives Will some understanding of what serial killers are really after, even without Lecter’s help. A look at the Leeds family crime scene in Atlanta first yields little, but later in his hotel room Will puts the forensics together with his instincts, and in an imagined confrontation charges the killer with his findings: “You touched her with your bare hands and then you pit the gloves back on and you wiped her down. But while the gloves were off, DID YOU OPEN THEIR EYES?” Then he calls Crawford and tells him to have their guy in the lab dust for prints on Mrs. Leeds’ fingernails and toenails, and all the victims’ corneas. We stay with Will until Chapter 9, in which Harris introduces the killer: Francis Dolarhyde, an employee at the Gateway Film Laboratory in St. Louis. Dolarhyde has a sordid past, marked by abuse at his grandmother’s hands, much mockery and misery. Now in his early forties, he lives in the house she left him with these creepy vestiges: “Her teeth were in a glass on the bedside table. The water had long since evaporated.” He was born with a cleft lip which he had corrected, but still has peg lateral incisors and trouble with sibilants. He doesn’t have friends, but he’s quietly competent with film processing and not obviously a threat to anyone; he gets into a relationship of sorts with a coworker, Reba McClane. In a limited way she’s better suited to him than she is to her place of employment, being blind. He wants his victims to see him in his supposed glory, as Will figures out, but for her there can be no such exhibition. Dolarhyde’s obsession with William Blake’s Great Red Dragon paintings and his intention to become the dragon through all the violence give his insanity some gravitas, at least in his own estimation. As hard as Harris tries, occasionally succeeding with details like the dry dentures in the glass, Red Dragon doesn’t get really disconcerting until near the novel’s end when the imagined eponym starts bellowing at Francis. Then it’s time for the all caps again: “YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR LITTLE BUDDY, DON’T YOU? YOU WANT HER TO BE YOUR LITTLE BUDDY, DON’T YOU?”
But Red Dragon is pretty successful in bringing the campy macabre into contrast with the dry and procedural, in being both horror and crime thriller. Will and his colleagues madly cogitate, fight sleep on stakeouts, and calm their stomachs with Alka-Seltzer, while Dolarhyde is having his idea of fun, bragging to and torturing his victims, bathing while bloodied under the moon in their back gardens. He and Lecter even exchange laudatory notes using a book cipher in one of the novel’s best sequences. Harris keeps his own language simple, and the simplicity comes to look like integrity contrasted with Dr. Lecter’s fancy chatter and the dragon’s awful and prideful hectoring: quiet sentences like “He telexed the results to Chicago”, or “Lounds took a lot of pictures”, have an urgency which is like Will’s determination to catch the Tooth Fairy. This is a subtler way for Harris to side with decency and law enforcement without giving Will an obviously heroic aspect. (Besides a scar on his stomach, courtesy of Hannibal’s linoleum knife, Will is given little physical description.) In The Silence of the Lambs Harris comes up with an altogether more developed character in Clarice Sterling, one with a background which Graham lacks, and he improves his plotting, contriving a couple of very effective twists. The spare language remains, contrasted with Buffalo Bill’s extravagantly detailed killings, and Dr. Lecter’s urbanity. This contrast is what powers these first two installments of what comes to be the Hannibal Lecter franchise, before the Doctor takes over in Hannibal (1999) and Hannibal Rising (2006). In those, Harris leaves behind the grey desks and Alka-Seltzer tablets for lavish table settings and Lecter’s fine foods (including the occasional unholy Eucharist), which the newly ambitious author takes to calling “provender”.