Red Dragon
by Thomas Harris
Summary
Will Graham, a former FBI profiler whose gift for entering a killer's mind cost him his nerve and nearly his life when he caught the psychiatrist and serial murderer Hannibal Lecter, is pulled out of a quiet retirement to help catch a new killer the press has nicknamed the Tooth Fairy, who murders entire families in their homes during the full moon and leaves bite marks on the bodies of the women he kills. Graham consults Lecter, now confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, for insight into the killer's mind, even as Lecter quietly works to sabotage the investigation and expose Graham's home address to the murderer he is hunting. Graham eventually identifies the killer as Francis Dolarhyde, a film processing technician disfigured since childhood by a cleft palate and shaped by a cruel, controlling grandmother, who has come to believe that killing families lets him transform into the fearsome, otherworldly figure from William Blake's painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. A tentative romance with a blind coworker named Reba McClane briefly pulls Dolarhyde back toward an ordinary life, but his other self reasserts control once he fears Reba has slept with another man, and after apparently faking his own death he tracks Graham to a rented house in Florida and attacks his family. Graham's wife Molly shoots Dolarhyde, though not before he slashes Graham's face open, leaving him alive but permanently scarred.
Harris writes in tight, procedural prose built from real FBI training and forensic detail, and the novel moves quickly between Graham's investigation and Dolarhyde's own increasingly sympathetic interior life, a structure that makes the killer as fully realized a character as the man hunting him, which is exactly what set the book apart from the crime fiction around it when it appeared.
Historical Context & Significance
G. P. Putnam's Sons published Red Dragon in 1981, and Stephen King, reviewing it in The Washington Post, called it probably the best popular novel to be published in America since The Godfather, a comparison that helped establish Harris's reputation well before Hannibal Lecter's later fame. The novel introduced Lecter as a minor character years before The Silence of the Lambs made him one of fiction's most recognized villains, and Harris wrote much of it after attending classes at the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, drawing directly on real profiling methods for Graham's technique.
It has been filmed twice, as Michael Mann's Manhunter in 1986 with Brian Cox as the character then spelled Lecktor, and as Red Dragon in 2002 with Anthony Hopkins reprising the role, and it supplied the plot for the third season of NBC's Hannibal in 2015.