He introduced one of the most memorable fictional villains of all time — up there with Darth Vader and Dracula — but relatively little is known about Thomas Harris
MIAMI — Thomas Harris, the creator of one of literature’s most terrifying monsters, arguably has one of the darkest imaginations of any writer working today. His infamous serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, devours his victims’s organs after delicately preparing them and once ate a man alive, serving slices of his brain with truffles and caper berries.
The novel’s protagonist, Cari Mora, is a Colombian refugee who works as the caretaker of a Miami Beach mansion that once belonged to drug lord Pablo Escobar. Cari lives with constant dread that immigration officials will revoke her temporary protected status, and she finds herself caught between two rival criminal networks that are vying for rumoured riches buried under the mansion.
When we arrived, he greeted the director and staff, and inquired about animals he saw on his last visit. “There was an opossum sleeping in here last time I was here,” he says, before asking about some baby owls he had seen perched on a cabinet. “I felt like I was being watched, and sure enough,” he says of the owls.
Harris is deeply private, but he’s not a recluse in the mold of J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon. When he’s not writing, he draws, cooks elaborate meals and has dinner with friends. He often sits outside at his bayfront Miami Beach property, where he keeps track of the ibises, possums, iguanas and the occasional dolphin or manatee. In the summer, he and his partner, Pace Barnes, go to their home in Sag Harbor, New York.
Harris was cordial about the fan photo, but it was the kind of intrusion he tries to avoid. Fame, he says, “is more of a nuisance than anything else.” He quotes a line from Gustave Flaubert: “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”
Harris wrote his second novel, “Red Dragon,” which introduced Hannibal, when he was caring for his ailing father in Mississippi. Stephen King compared the book to “The Godfather” and later called Hannibal “the great fictional monster of our time.” Director Michael Mann adapted the story into a feature film.
“The dialogue was very familiar,” he says. “So I sat down and watched it. And it was a wonderful movie.” Harris doesn’t entirely dispute this account but recasts it as cordial persuasion by De Laurentiis, who died in 2010. “He did have continuation rights to the character and could have done whatever he wanted to,” Harris says. “He had a lot of enthusiasm for a movie, and it was contagious, I suppose.”
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