The first excerpt from Red Dragon I read was in Michael Newton’s How to Write Action/Adventure Novels, which quoted this paragraph (spoilers ahead):
She forgot the stance and she forgot the front sight but she got a good two-handed grip on the pistol and as the door exploded inward she blew a rat a hole through his thigh—“Muhner!”—and she shot him in the face as he slid down the door facing and she shot him in the face as he sat on the floor and she ran to him and shot him twice in the face as he sprawled against the wall, scalp down to his chin and his hair on fire.
It’s a breathless sentence, a Hemingway-esque concatenation of short words and direct actions. I sought out Thomas Harris’s book immediately. I was 11 or so.
Hannibal Lector was a part of the culture by then, parodied in National Lampoon’s Loaded Weapon One among other places. I didn’t much care about Lector, and reading Red Dragon, I cared even less. Will Graham and Francis Dolarhyde commanded my imagination.
Red Dragon is a book that daunted James Ellroy (“the greatest suspense novel ever written,” he wrote in the intro to his L.A. Noir omnibus) and impressed Ian Rankin (“I was in thrall to Thomas Harris” from a Daily Mail interview).
By 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. 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.
The book is a master class in suspense. The forensic details are expertly deployed. Lector’s advice (“Have you seen blood in the moonlight, Will? It appears quite black”) is sinister without seeming supernatural. Graham piecing together how the Tooth Fairy chooses victims is logical and inspired.
But 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). 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.
“Try to say ‘grandmother,’” Brother Buddy said.
The plosive G defeated him. Francis strangled easily on tears.
A red wasp buzzed and tapped against the ceiling.
“Never mind,” his grandmother said. “I’ll just bet you can say your name. I just know a big boy like you can say his name. Say it for me.”
The child’s face brightened. The big boys had helped him with this. He wanted to please. He collected himself.
“Cunt Face,” he said.
Your heart breaks for him…not to the point where what he does is forgivable, or even understandable. But it’s understandable to him. 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.
It’s a little sad that the legacy of Thomas Harris resides with Lector, and that his work normalized serial killers. What he does in Red Dragon is humanize a serial killer in a discomfiting, awful, fascinating way.
Graham, unlike in some screen adaptations, isn’t a buffoon or a monster himself. He’s someone cursed with the ability to empathize with monsters. To get inside their heads. But of course, they’re getting inside his, as well.
“If God doesn’t exist, everything is permitted,” Dostoevsky wrote in a better and longer book than Red Dragon. But Harris’s formulation of this, the philosophical note he leaves Graham to ponder, is in the same vein:
He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against.
He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine.
Graham is someone who’s had the veneer of civilization stripped from him. His gift is tied to an existential belief that things only matter because we make them matter. Graham empathizes with Francis Dolarhyde, and we empathize with Graham, and we leave Red Dragon a little sickened with ourselves.
Best insights on Red Dragon I've ever read, Sam. Thanks. I've yanked my ragged copy off the shelf for a re-read.
I have to re-read it. The Michael Mann film has replaced the book in my memories... I have to remedy that.