Red Dragon starts very well, with the discovery of a family brutally slain in the same way as another one had been the previous month. Immediately, and wrongly, the detectives presume the killer is going to strike on the next full moon - I thought this was a sly dig at the way every serial killer has to have some quirk to get his own film these days - then I realised that Red Dragon came out 20 years ago and is probably to blame for it... Anyway, we pretty quickly get to find out whodunnit and the plot of the book is really concerned with whyhedunit and whosnextforit. We also get, of course, the literary genesis of Hannibal Lecter. It is brilliant and daring of Harris to make him only a tangential character, and to have his "real" story in the past and largely untold, but it is also the book's fatal flaw because Lecter is the most interesting character in miles.
The actual killer in the book is a boring nutter. And here's the rub: for all Harris's interest and effort in the whydunit aspect of the story, it's all very pat. Well, he done it because his granny was nasty to him as a child and he has a deformed palate. (This is a problem in almost all crime storytelling. Cracker, the best TV series of the 1990s, was a masterpiece of creative writing, plotting, dialogue and wit, but the psychology behing the killers was always much too neat and simple for my liking. He didn't hit puberty until late! She was made to act like a guide dog for her blind sister! The only one there that hit the spot was Albie Kinsella, from the story "To Be a Somebody," with his seething nest of class-paranoia, post-Hillsborough trauma and grief for his father. But I digress.) Is that all there is? So it would seem.
I've read that Harris takes so long to write each book because of all his research. I think he should do a little less research as he's frequently incapable of wearing it lightly: one chapter begins
The Brooklyn Museum is closed to the general public on Tuesdays, but art classes and refreshers are admitted. The museum is an excellent facility for serious scholarship. The staff members are knowledgeable and accommodating; they often allow researchers to come by appointment on Tuesdays to see items not on public display. ... Entrance to the Brooklyn Museum on Tuesdays is through a single door on the extreme right.
Just think of the work that went into finding the publicity brochure he copied that from! Dialogue is occasionally top-heavy on research too, with one character nonchalantly wondering aloud:
"Maybe Dolarhyde knew the maxillary arch survives fires a lot of times."
But this is slightly over-griping, as the writing is generally pretty good, featureless enough to enable swift page-turning but not so bland as to be boring. Otherwise, the book seems to cash in a lot of standard thriller chips towards the end: the trick where you think the baddie's shooting someone else but actually he's shooting himself; the cartoonish resurrection of the baddie when it's all but over; the explanatory here's-how-it-all-happened monologue which was already excruciatingly awful back in 1960 in Psycho; and the Jerry Springer/He Man-esque moral of the tale right at the end.
Ultimately the greatest crime in Red Dragon is that it didn't leave me with anything.
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