Of the rest, 1975’s terrorist thriller Black Sunday is very much apprentice work, while 2006’s Hannibal Rising is poor, and little more than a novelisation of a film script.
The third in the sequence, Hannibal, although more problematical, is graced with a surreal climax and an eerie, ambiguous coda, the only logical conclusion to the lovers’ dance of Lecter and his FBI pursuer, Clarice Starling. Every thriller writer that followed, myself included, worked in their shadow. The first and second of these are masterpieces of the thriller genre, elevated by the quality of Harris’s prose, the subtlety of his characterisation and the acuteness of his psychological insight. His reputation rests on three novels published between 19 – Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal – each featuring the cannibalistic psychiatrist Dr Hannibal Lecter.
He does not give interviews, makes no public appearances and, according to reports, regards the act of writing as a form of torture. In this age of ubiquity, Harris – in common with his near-namesake, Thomas Pynchon – remains an enigma. As Thomas Harris writes in his second novel, Red Dragon, of the FBI profiler Will Graham: “It seemed to Graham that he had learned nothing in 40 years he had just gotten tired.”Īlmost four decades since the publication of that book, the same might be said of Harris himself, although we can only speculate based on the available textual evidence. It was the sound of an artist engaged in the deconstruction of his own back catalogue, an attack on the past as a potential harbinger of future change.ĭylan was in his forties by then, a difficult decade for any artist. Thus concealed, he would commence upon the evisceration of beloved songs from his back catalogue, while hardcore fans attempted to pick traces of Masters of War or Like A Rolling Stone from the ensuing carnage. In the mid-1980s, during what many might consider to be one of the more problematical phases of his career, Bob Dylan took to appearing on stage wearing an anorak with the hood raised.
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