![]() ![]() Harris’s depiction of the FBI’s serial killer investigators in Red Dragon comes out of the real-life work that the FBI was pioneering in the 1970s, during what is generally considered the peak of serial killing in America. Lecter, behind bars in a Maryland asylum. Graham joins the team hoping to fulfill a solely consultative role, but over the course of the investigation he becomes more and more personally and dangerously invested in the case, thanks mostly to the machinations of Dr. The Tooth Fairy’s presumed MO is to case out a suburban family’s home (in working-class guise as a meter reader), kill or injure the pet, and then, in a day or two, return to murder the family. This killer, dubbed “The Tooth Fairy” by the police, is on a lunar cycle the mission is to stop him before he kills again. But Graham’s old FBI boss Jack Crawford needs him back on the investigative trail to catch a new serial killer who has slain two suburban families in the South over the past two months. We learn in the book’s opening chapters that protagonist Will Graham, an FBI investigator and serial killer profiler, has retired, gotten married, and settled down on the Florida Keys after his last case-the pursuit and capture of Lecter-has left him physically and psychically scarred. Red Dragon was the first in Harris’s series of Lecter novels, and opens after Lecter has already been apprehended and institutionalized. It is also a methodical, deliberate exploration of the class anxieties, cultural tensions, and racial division at the heart of early Reagan-era America, especially in the American South. Throughout Red Dragon, signifiers of working class life clash with those of a comfortable middle (or even upper) class existence, and the ghosts of the Old South cling closely to a New South that is trying to emerge into the 20th century, culturally and economically. ![]() But Harris’s novel is more than just a taut true crime thriller that first widely popularized the archetype of the serial killer profiler. Hannibal Lecter, and arguably set a gold standard for all serial killer fiction to follow. Thomas Harris’s sophomore novel Red Dragon (1981) introduced the world to iconic serial killer and cultured cannibal Dr. William Petersen as Will Graham in Manhunter (1986) ![]()
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