Red Dragon – to my mind the greatest suspense novel ever written – spawned an entire sub-genre.” I didn’t know that the mano-a-mano duels of cops and serial killers would soon become a big fat fucking cliché.

I was not familiar with the term ‘serial killer.’ Thomas Harris’s brilliant and ground-breaking novel Red Dragon was yet to be published. Noir: “I wanted to write a contemporarily set, contrapunctually structured novel about a sex obsessed cop tacking down a sexually motivated killer. In 1980, future literary star James Ellroy was in the middle of trying to find his way, and later explained in the retrospective introduction to L.A. It is quite a descent from, “Gave him a glass of iced tea,” in the first sentence to, “He’s a secretor,” in the last, and the story will only get more disturbing as the reader desperately keeps turning the pages. “Used a glass cutter and a suction cup to get in the house last time. “He’s not too comfortable with locks,” Crawford said. “He’s blond, right-handed and really strong, wears a size eleven shoe. “What else did you keep out of the papers?” He smashes the mirrors and uses the pieces. “Eighty-six when I called in this afternoon,” Crawford said. “Two families killed in their houses a month apart. “What was in the Miami Herald and the Times,” Graham said.

If you brought pictures, leave them in the briefcase. You’ve got to talk about it, so let’s have it. “I don’t want to talk about it anywhere, Jack. “I should have caught you in Marathon when you got off work,” he said. Jack Crawford looked at the pleasant old house, salt-silvered wood in the clear light. Will Graham sat Crawford down at a picnic table between the house and the ocean and gave him a glass of iced tea. Red Dragon is now exactly 40 years old and remains the best of the canon. The first and last Harris books, while still valuable, are unconnected to the Lecter mythos. Compared to most professional thriller writers active during the same 44-year span, this is a slender bibliography, but the middle four entries concerning Hannibal Lecter had major impact. Thomas Harris produced six books from 1975 to 2019.

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