The Red Dragon Is A Lifelong Stand

One day I last year I was toiling on some minor assignment for the show CSI: New York -- researching burns, or somesuch --when I realized something quite odd. The only reason this show existed, the only reason I was getting paid to look at pictures of disgusting third-degree burns and print out the results on ridiculously expensive photography paper, was due to a book I'd first read in high school called Red Dragon. Turning my attention away from the picture of a human arm covered in hideous yellow pustules, I drew something in the margin of my notebook that looked like this:

Red Dragon (1981) - Manhunter (1986) - The Silence of the Lambs (1988) - Profiler (1996) - CSI (2000)  - CSI: NY (2004) = my paycheck (2010).

Call it "six degrees of separation", but when Thomas Harris released Red Dragon in 1981, he was doing a whole helluva lot more than putting out one of the outstanding novels of all time. He was, from a creative standpoint, tossing a lighted torch into a gunpowder magazine roughly the size of New England. The explosion set off by the release of Red Dragon, or perhaps I should say the series of explosions which followed, is still going on today, like an endless chain of firecrackers. When I get invited to go see Gary Sinese's band play on the CBS lot, and briefly feel important as a result (don't worry, it fades quickly), it's a direct, if unimportant, result of that original bang.

You see, while there had been novels about serial killers before -- Lawrence Sanders The First Deadly Sin comes to mind -- and while the idea of solving crimes via forensic investigation alone was hardly new (Quincy did it all through my childhood), it wasn't until Harris introduced us to Will Graham, Jack Crawford, Alan Blood, Bryan Zeller, and the rest of the bloodhound gang over there at the FBI's Behavioral Science division that the genre of "forensic crimefighters" (and its favorite subgenre, "forensic crimefighters vs. brilliant serial killers") was truly created.

Switch on your television. What do you see? CSI, CSI: New York, CSI: Miami, NCIS, Profiler, Criminal Minds, Crossing Jordan, Bones, Cold Case, and various others, all over the guide. Go to Borders (if it hasn't closed yet) and look at the shelves: they're crammed with books like The Sculptor and Along Came a Spider and Sleepyhead and Compulsion. Serial killers are everywhere; and hot on their trails are forensic investigators, following hair and fiber and blood evidence like breadcrumb-trails, or trying to get inside their heads using sophisticated psychological techniques. It is no less popular in “reality” format; shows like Forensic Files, The New Detectives, Cold Case Files, Extreme Evidence and Medical Detectives examine the work of real-life psychiatrists, psychologists, ballistics experts, crime-scene investigators and forensic technicians as they used their highly specialized skills to hunt down fugitive criminals, break cold cases, and most famously, trap serial murderers before they kill again. So prevalent are books and TV shows and movies in this theme it’s hard to imagine a time when none of this existed, or that, in absolute terms, it’s actually a recent phenomenon, and that Thomas Harris is largely responsible for it.

Which belatedly brings me to the book, and why it's so damned good. I suppose I could examine the obvious reasons -- Harris' meticulous research on every aspect of forensics, psychology, law-enforcement produre, etc., his brilliant use of the Iceberg Theory as a stylistic tool, the terrifying vividness of the two villians, Dolarhyde and Lecter, his relentless pacing, or his unusual prose style, which might be described as Hemingway on intellectual steroids -- but I'd rather concentrate on the aspect I find most interesting; the protagonist, Will Graham.

I use the word specifically. Wounded and world-weary, plagued by doubts and terrors, walking a tightrope between the supersanity of a scientist and the madness of a murderer, Graham is far from the Hollywood archtype of a hero. When Crawford tries to mollify Molly by telling her "it's his bad luck to be the best", he isn't referring to Graham's skills as a forensic investigator. Graham is very good in that regard, but as we discover, there are others just as good. What Crawford wants from him is the intangible "gift" that Graham possesses, the ability to assume the viewpoint of anyone he encounters. What heroic qualities Graham possesses reside largely in his willingness, however grudging it may be, to put on his badge one last time to hunt the Dragon, knowing as he does the psychological torment the hunt is going to inflict upon him.

Graham is extraordinary as a detective in part because of its inability to separate himself from his cases. This may be commonplace now, but it has not always been so. Novels, TV shows and movies have traditionally assumed that a detective with an extraordinary ability, such as Sherlock Holmes, will naturally embrace that ability. They rarely if ever explore the idea that gifts such as Graham's can be a curse as well as a blessing. Dr. Bloom scolds Jack Crawford with the words, "You wouldn't like it either if you had it (the ability of pure empathy and projection), Jack." He also reminds Crawford that Graham is a man flooded and inundated by fear -- hardly a typical characteristic in a hero. Graham uses a form of self-hypnosis to distance himself from the horrors he has to crawl through, literally on hands and knees; it takes the shape of pretending that the manhunt is an exercise in pure forensics, a kind of logic problem that he, Graham, is particularly good at. When Graham can achieve this distance, he's happy -- or at least content. But the harder he works a case, the less possible this distance becomes. The sense of simpatico he achieves with the murderer "spreads in his head like a spill." Over the course of the novel we come to realize that Graham is in a certain sense insane, and within his head lurks the same madness he hunts in others. He differs from his quarry mainly in his unwillingness to let the madness dictate his actions, but even this requires a certain amount of denial. When he reunites with Lecter in the mental hospital, the doctor quips, "Do you know how you caught me, Will? Because we're just alike. If you want the old scent back, smell yourself."

Great detectives are often seen as men apart. They view the unraveling of a mystery as a purely intellectual exercise. Sherlock Holmes occasionally took to task his friend and chronicler, Watson, for the sensational way in which Watson recorded Holmes' exploits. In "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" he says: "You have erred perhaps in attempting to put color and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing..Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales." Edward X. Delaney, who caught two serial killers over the four Deadly Sin novels, actually remarks in the last of these novels how interesting the counterpoint is between the frenzied, hot-blooded passion of the killer and the cool, unemotional, methodical actions of the detective who hunts that killer. Both men view their detective work as a professional exercise. Graham, with his blessing-curse of "pure empathy and projection", cannot. How he would love to possess the icy detachment of Sherlock Holmes, who actually lamented the death of his opposite number, Professor Moriarty, because of the challenge he presented! Alas, for Graham, the Hobbs, Lecters and Dolarhydes of the world are not the opposing queens on a chessboard, to be forced bloodlessly into concession. They are monsters, and sometimes monsters bite.