Killer doctor who inspired cinematic history: Author reveals the chilling story behind Hannibal Lecter... and how he actually SAVED someone's life | Daily Mail Online comments The author behind one of the most unforgettable villains of cinematic history has finally revealed the real-life killer behind his chilling creation. Thomas Harris, who rarely gives interviews, has previously never spoken about what inspired his cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, as portrayed in the classic Silence of the Lambs by Anthony Hopkins. But he has now revealed the character was inspired by a real-life doctor and murderer he met while visiting a Mexican prison in the 1960s Author Thomas Harris (right) has revealed the inspiration for his most chilling creation, Hannibal Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs (left), was in fact a real-life doctor he met in a Mexican prison while working as a journalist Harris met the doctor at the Nuevo Leon State Prison, at Monterrey, Mexico, as a 23-year-old journalist. The author was at the prison to interview Dykes Askew Simmons, a former mental patient who was under the death sentence for killing three people.

But he met 'Dr Salazar' after learning he had apparently saved the life of Simmons when he had been shot during an attempt to escape from the prison about a year earlier. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Writing in the introduction to The Silence of the Lambs 25th anniversary edition, part of which has been published in The Times, Harris explains how he was introduced to the killer doctor by a prison warden, who failed to tell him of his violent past. The author recalls interviewing Dr Salazar, which he later explains is not his real name, about how he treated the gunshot wounds and stopped the bleeding. Dr Hannibal Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins in the 2001 film Red Dragon, is one of the most unforgettable villains in cinematic and literary history But he describes how the conversation took a much darker twist when the doctor began questioning the journalist on Simmons's disfigured appearance, the nature of torment and the murderer's victims. It was not until Harris left the doctor's office that he learned of Dr Salazar's history from the prison warden. The doctor was a murderer and the warden told Harris: 'He will never leave this place.

He is insane.' Harris says the doctor served 20 years in prison, but also provided the inspiration behind his most famous creation. He explained while writing his novel he needed to create a character with a 'peculiar understanding of the criminal mind', adding: 'It was not Dr Salazar. But because of Dr Salazar, I could recognise his colleague and fellow practitioner, Hannibal Lecter.' Lecter was first introduced by Harris in the 1981 novel Red Dragon, where he was depicted as a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibal. He became part of cinematic history however when Hopkins portrayed the character in the Silence of the Lambs, winning an Academy Award for the part along the way. It was in this film that he delivered the immortal line: 'I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti'. In the film Lecter questions a young FBI trainee Clarice Starling about her childhood traumas, in a scene which is eerily reminiscent of Harris's depiction of his encounter with Dr Salazar.

Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, Harris's detective whose terrifying encoutner with Hannibal Lecter in the film Silence of the Lambs was inspired by a real-life doctor The first film adapted from Harris's novels was Manhunter, which was based on Red Dragon and featured Brian Cox as Lecter. Hopkins reprised the role however in 2001's Hannibal, where Lecter became the main character of the film. He also played Lecter in a second adaptation of Red Dragon in 2002. The character was chosen as the number one movie villain by the American Film Institute in 2003.

John Lanchester reviews ‘Hannibal’ by Thomas Harris · LRB 29 July 1999 by Thomas Harris Heinemann, 496 pp, £16.99, June 1999, ISBN 0 434 00940 7 The first time we – that’s we the reading public – met Dr Hannibal Lecter, he was lying on his cot in his cell at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with a copy of Alexandre Dumas’s Grand dictionnaire de cuisine open on his chest. Lecter was incarcerated for having murdered nine people ‘that we know about’, and having crippled two others, one of whom (of whom more later) was permanently attached to a respirator in Baltimore. Dr Lecter was being visited by Will Graham, a Special Investigator attached to the FBI, in pursuit of a man who had murdered two families. When Graham arrives at Lecter’s cell, the good doctor wakes up: ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light redly in tiny points.’ Brrrrr. Is it chilly in here, or is it me?

All this happens in Red Dragon, Thomas Harris’s second novel, his first being the, in retrospect, remarkably undistinguished all-Palestinians-are-terrorists thriller Black Sunday. Red Dragon’s back story, as these things are called in Hollywood, is that Graham is the man who caught Dr Lecter, thanks to his special ability to enter the imaginative world of serial killers. (One period touch is that in those days – Red Dragon was published in 1981 – murderers of this type were still known as ‘psychopaths’.) Graham had gone to see Lecter because the doctor had attended to one of the subsequent victims when he was working in ER: the man in question had fallen out of a tree while bow-hunting and stuck an arrow through his leg. Graham wanted to ask if Lecter remembered anything about this old wound. While talking to him, Graham became convinced that Lecter was the killer for whom they were looking; Lecter realised; and almost succeeded in eviscerating the FBI man with a linoleum knife before being arrested.

The thing which made Graham rumble Lecter was a book on his shelves containing a Wound Man diagram – an illustration in old medical textbooks showing a man suffering from all the wounds likely to be inflicted during hand-to-hand combat. Lecter’s victim – the deer hunter with the old arrow wound – had been laid out in a similar posture. In Red Dragon, things naturally go wrong for Will Graham. He does catch the bad guy, one Francis Dolarhyde, who turns out to be the employee of a film-processing company: Graham twigs that he had developed film of both the families he had attacked.

(Dolarhyde suffered from a cleft palate as a child; Harris is heroically un-PC about giving his baddies physical deformities.) Lecter manages to convey Graham’s address to Dolarhyde, who then sets out to kill Graham’s family, but is himself killed while trying to do so – though not before getting a knife to Graham, so that when The Silence of the Lambs arrived in 1989, we were told that ‘Will’s face looks like goddam Picasso drew it.’ By The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter’s place of incarceration has become the Baltimore Hospital for the Criminally Insane. His visitor this time is 25-year-old Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee with a double major in psychology and criminology from the University of Virginia.

(This, incidentally, is one of Harris’s rare factual mistakes: the University of Virginia doesn’t offer a criminology major.) She has been sent ostensibly to solicit Lecter’s contribution to a psychology questionnaire; in fact, and unbeknownst to her, to provoke Lecter into giving information about a serial killer, currently on the loose, who has skinned his five female victims, and acquired the unlovely nickname of Buffalo Bill. (The name is from the eponymous poem by e.e. cummings: ‘how do you like your blueeyed boy/Mister Death’. ) On the walls of the cell are Lecter’s drawings; one over the sink shows the Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, seen from the Belvedere. Lecter is lying on his bunk, perusing the Italian edition of Vogue. ‘Dr Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in tiny points of red.’ Those maroon eyes might seem like a deliberately anti-realistic detail – and in one sense they are.

The first two Lecter novels are a carefully balanced mixture of realism and fantasy, in which Harris takes pains to get all the details right, the better to show off the florid Grand Guignol of his great invention, Hannibal the Cannibal. An analogy might be with Hergé’s cartoons, in which the elaborate accuracy of the backgrounds are in a strange harmony with the heavy stylisation of the principal figures. When Harris says that the formula C33H36N4O6 stands for the chemical bilirubin, and that it is the principal colouring agent in human excrement, we know it’s true. When he says that Dr Lecter’s thoughts ‘were no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics’, we know that’s true, too. (What a sentence: ‘His thoughts were no more bound by fear or kindness than Milton’s were by physics.’) These fictions are not realistic but they are plausible. That is a shorthand way of saying that they satisfy the expectations they generate, and don’t violate their own internal logic – a phenomenon which is as hard to describe as demonstrate but simple to perceive. The books are also satisfyingly multiple in their layering.

It is a well known truth that it is impossible to write popular fiction ironically: that’s to say, without believing it, and without resisting the temptation to grimace at one’s peers over the shoulders of naive readers. Harris doesn’t try to do that but he does give his novels a density of allusion and a subtle interlacing which means they can be read in more than one way. An excellent website at the comp lit department of Rutgers draws attention to some of the clevernesses in The Silence of the Lambs, none of which you’d notice unless you were looking very hard. Thus: Lecter’s ninth victim, whom he discusses with Starling, was a flautist called Benjamin Raspail. This is a pun on ‘derasping’, the process by which grapes are skinned, in order to make the Italian red wine Amarone. (A ‘big Amarone’ is the wine Lecter tells Clarice he drank when he ate the liver of a census-taker who tried to ‘quantify’ him.

In the movie this wine was dumbed down to being ‘a nice Chianti’, which I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have anything like the necessary density of flavour.) Raspail himself is derasped, before being eaten by the board of the Baltimore Symphony; Buffalo Bill’s victims are also derasped – flayed. Raspail’s name is therefore one of a whole network of images of flaying which is, in the old sense, witty. Another example: when Starling finds the killer, he is living in Belvedere, Ohio. Remember the drawing in Lecter’s cell? Back to those anti-realistic maroon eyes. They might seem whimsical – might indeed be whimsical – but their intellectual pedigree can’t be faulted, since they come from the work on criminal physiognomies of Alphonse Bertillon, founder of the dismal science of criminology.

Bertillon also supplies the epigraph for Red Dragon: ‘One only sees that which one observes, and one observes only things which are in the mind.’ This is a heavy nudge about Lecter, the fictional monster who, we are to surmise, speaks to the monster in all of us, and whose name and nature owe more than a little to the introductory poem from Les Fleurs du Mal, ‘Au Lecteur’: Mais parmi les chacals, les panthères, les lices, Les singes, les scorpions, les vautours, les serpents, Les monstres glapissants, hurlants, grognants, rampants, Dans la ménagerie infâme de nos vices, Il en est un plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde! Quoiqu’il ne pousse ni grands gestes ni grands cris, Il ferait volontiers de la terre un débris Et dans un bâillement avalerait le monde; C’est l’Ennui! – l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire, Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, – Hypocrite lecteur, – mon semblable, – mon frère! Lecter is a projection of our desire to see monsters who echo the monstrousness within us. At one early point in Hannibal, Lecter, ‘connoisseur of facial cheeses’, is watching a crowd in Florence go around an exhibition called Atrocious Torture Instruments. ‘Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?’ One answer to that clunky question – which in itself reveals a degree of strain – is: Hannibal Lecter. He is attractive because we are repulsive; the more people like Lecter, the worse the news about human nature. The novels are designed to appeal to a mass audience whom they also despise. They draw their energy from a set of ambiguities which revolve around this. Harris is in the potentially uncomfortable position of a snob and misanthrope who has written a book of enormous mass appeal.

It’s not that the books are about these difficulties, it’s that they are them; the surprising thing is not that Harris took 11 years to write Hannibal, but that he managed to do it at all. Given all this, there is something oneiric, or uncanny, about the extent of Hannibal’s popular success. In the UK, the publishers having printed 175,000 hardbacks, a further 71,000 copies were sold on the day of publication in anticipation of the next printing. One Edinburgh bookshop had ordered 16 copies – not a negligible quantity for a hardback novel, under normal circumstances. On the morning of publication day they rang and ordered 100 more. On the afternoon of publication day they rang and ordered another 500. Hannibal went straight in at number one on the bestseller list, to no one’s surprise; what did attract comment was the fact that it outsold numbers two to fifty-one combined. A third layer of irony or weirdness has been added by the fact that Hannibal has already been supplanted at number one by the, it turns out, even more eagerly awaited new book about Harry Potter.

Actually, Potter is eating Lecter alive and, at the time of writing, his adventures are at numbers one, two and three in the Amazon.co.uk bestseller list. The first two books have, broadly speaking, the same plot, except that in Red Dragon Lecter only succeeded in making mischief from his cell, whereas in The Silence of the Lambs he manages to escape from it. Hannibal is of necessity a more open book, in both atmosphere and structure. It opens, seven years after the events described in The Silence of the Lambs, with Lecter still free, whereabouts unknown, and Clarice still in the FBI. Her career, however, has stalled, thanks to a combination of jealous colleagues and her own anti-talent for office politics. This is the first big change in the world of the new book: the FBI of the first two novels was, more or less, the usual idealised crime-busting machine of popular fiction. The FBI of Hannibal is the FBI of the Ruby Ridge massacre: a poisoned, dysfunctional institution, part of a Washington world of backbiting, infighting and incompetence.

First sentence: ‘Clarice Starling’s Mustang boomed up the entrance ramp at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on Massachusetts Avenue, a headquarters rented from the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in the interest of economy.’ The novel’s superb opening scene has Clarice taking part in a raid on a drug factory which goes horribly wrong. Someone leaks news about the raid to a television news station, which in turn tells the principal target of the raid, one Evelda Drumgo, presumably in order to secure better footage from their news helicopter. A shoot-out takes place in which Clarice’s friend John Brigham (who has, by the way, coached her to three successive interservice combat pistol championships) is killed, as is one of the two BATF agents who are anti-realistically called Burke and Hare. Clarice kills five baddies, including Evelda Drumgo herself, who happens to be carrying her baby in a sling. Footage of her shooting the baby-toting drug-dealer is all over the airwaves; she is ‘crucified’ by the tabloids, and suspended from duty. In her disgrace, she gets a letter of consolation from her old pal Dr Hannibal Lecter.

It looks as if Clarice’s FBI career is over: but strings are pulled, and she finds herself assigned to Behavioral Sciences, the section of the Bureau that deals with serial killers, with the brief of trying to track down the doctor. The person who pulls the wires to get Clarice her new job is Hannibal’s real bad guy. Mason Verger, whom we first heard of on a ventilator in Baltimore, is the last of Lecter’s surviving victims. He is the heir to the Verger slaughterhouse fortune (‘today the Vergers slaughter 86,000 cattle a day, and approximately 36,000 pigs, a number that varies slightly with the season’) and as such is immensely rich, immensely powerful and immensely cross. Verger is still on a ventilator, these days at Muskrat Farm, the family palace in Maryland. He lives in a darkened room whose only other occupant is a huge eel in a tank; he has no lips, no nose and only one eye (but no eyelids). He ‘was all teeth, like a creature of the deep, deep ocean’.

All this thanks to Lecter, who gave him a cocktail of hallucinogenic drugs and encouraged him to feed his own face to his pet dogs. Verger has long black hair which usually sits curled up on top of his ventilator. His pleasures include tormenting children and drinking martinis flavoured with their tears. His plans for Lecter involve having him kidnapped and eaten alive by specially bred pigs. This is the biggest change from the earlier books. There, Lecter was the worst creature in the world. Here, he isn’t. As we meet him in his new life, passing himself off as Dr Fell – with, of all things, a job, as curator of the Capponi archive in Florence, the earlier incumbent having mysteriously disappeared – we begin to see a Lecter who, while not exactly well-adjusted, is content with his medieval manuscripts, classical music concerts, and high-ceilinged rooms in the Palazzo Capponi, the latter so welcome ‘after his years of confinement’. Harris repeatedly calls Lecter a ‘monster’, but he doesn’t really seem all that much of one, not least because Harris goes to the trouble of giving him a childhood which explains his fixations.

It turns out that Lecter ‘stamm’ aus Litauen’, his father a count, his mother a Visconti. (In a bizarre aside, we are told later that he is a cousin of the painter Balthus.) The parents were killed by retreating German soldiers; his sister, Mischa, was killed and eaten by Nazi troops who had previously done the same to a young deer – hence Dr Lecter’s anti-deer-hunter thing; hence also his cannibalism. All this humanises Lecter. We find out about the primal scene in his psychological formation (the one in which Mischa is killed and eaten, and he then finds her teeth in the Germans’ ‘reeking stool-pit’) in the course of one of the book’s best set-pieces. Lecter is flying back to North America, having narrowly escaped capture in Florence at the hands of Verger’s henchmen. He is flying in tourist class, disguised as a member of Old World Fantasy, a Canadian tour party which has just visited 11 European countries in 17 days. ‘Shoulder room is 20 inches. Hip room between arm rests is 20 inches.

This is two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.’ He can put up with the small children on either side of him, one of whom is playing a beeping computer game; he can put up with ‘rebreathing the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air’; but he cannot put up with airline food. Dr Lecter has equipped himself with pâté de foie gras and Anatolian figs, and a half-bottle of ‘a St Estèphe he favours’, in a box from Fauchon in Paris. He waits until most of the passengers are asleep, and then opens his treat: ‘the silk bow yields with a whisper.’ But the small boy beside him wakes up and demands a share of the pâté (unluckily for Lecter, his favourite food is liverwurst); the child’s mother prods the Fauchon bread with the finger she has been using to investigate her baby’s diaper; the stewardess comes and confiscates the wine. Then Lecter drifts into reverie, and wakes in terror from his memories of Mischa’s death.

‘In the world of the airplane comes a short scream from his sweating face, thin and high, piercing.’ This is a different Lecter from that of the previous novels, the monster who knew no more of fear and kindness etc. It’s as if this book belongs to a different genre; Stephen King, in a rave review for the New York Times, argued that the novel was pure and simply a work of Horror. That might be true, but the trouble is that the novel’s greatest horror, which comes at its ending, is also its chief implausibility. Clarice and Lecter rescue each other from Mason Verger and his killer pigs. Lecter kidnaps Paul Krendler, Clarice’s chief enemy at the FBI, saws the top of his head off, and feeds his brains to an eager Clarice as part of an elaborate dinner. (Amuse-gueule of Belon oyster and sausage; first course, sautéed brains with beurre-noisette and truffle; main course, quails stuffed with foie gras; dessert, soufflé and Château d’Yquem.) I hope it goes without saying that Krendler is still alive while his brains are cooked and eaten.

Lecter has used drugs and hypnosis on Clarice, and the extent to which she is aware of herself, and what’s she’s doing, is made deliberately vague. Even so, the moral algebra of Hannibal, which has hitherto been careful, is suddenly and spectacularly abandoned, and the novel ends with the happy couple – that’s Clarice and Lecter – living together in South America three years later. There is a sense of discontinuity not only with the earlier books but also within the novel itself. In case you’re wondering: ‘Their relationship has a great deal to do with the penetration of Clarice Starling, which she avidly welcomes and encourages. It has much to do with the envelopment of Hannibal Lecter, far beyond the bounds of his experience … Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day.’ If this is an attempt to slap the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention, it works, but at too high an aesthetic price. It is harder than that to outwit the monster Ennui.

Thomas Harris - Biography - IMDb Thomas Harris Jump to: Overview (1) | Mini Bio (1) | Trade Mark (1) | Trivia (14) Overview (1) 1940 , Jackson, Mississippi, USA Mini Bio (1) Thomas Harris was born in 1940 in Jackson, Mississippi, USA. He was raised in the town of Rich where his father worked as a farmer. He earned his bachelor's degree in English from Baylor University in Texas in 1964. While attending school, he also worked for the local newspaper. After graduating, Harris traveled Europe for a time. Back in the USA, he worked for the Associated Press out of New York. Not coincidentally, his duties for the press included covering murders and other crimes. This helped fuel his imagination in the fictional world, and he began to write macabre stories for magazines that began to show his attention for detail that would make his subsequent novels so popular. In 1975, he wrote his first novel, Black Sunday, about a diabolical plot to kill thousands with a blimp during the Superbowl.

Perhaps ahead of his time, the terrorism of 11 September, 2001, led to many stadiums being turned into no-fly zones due to fears of a similar attack. The book was turned into a film -- Black Sunday (1977) -- a very short two years after being published. Following its success, he devoted his career entirely to fictional novelization. In 1981, Harris wrote his first book in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, Red Dragon. Though the character of Lecter did not become famous (or infamous, as the case may be) for another decade, the book did spark a loosely-based movie, Manhunter (1986), which was quickly dismissed at first, grossing back only about half its cost. Then, in 1988, Harris wrote another novel about the character Lecter, The Silence of the Lambs. This time, he gave the character more of a presence, although he still did not dominate the book. When this was turned into a film three years later as The Silence of the Lambs (1991), it became an instant hit and swept the "Big 5" at the Academy Awards, becoming only the third movie to do so.

After the success of The Silence of the Lambs in both movie and book form, there became a growing demand among fans - and film producer Dino De Laurentiis -- for there to be another chapter in the Hannibal Lector series. It took 11 years between novels, but Harris finally delivered again in 1999 with the best-selling novel Hannibal. It was made into a film two years later in Hannibal (2001) and, although dismissed by some critics and fans for straying from the book in parts (as well as Jodie Foster 's non-appearance as Agent Clarisse Starling), it set opening records in box office sales for an R-rated film. Because of the large box office take and the fact that Anthony Hopkins , who won an Oscar for his role in the second Lecter film, did not play Lecter in Manhunter (1986), De Laurentis and Harris came to terms to make a second version of the first book, this time properly titled Red Dragon (2002). This film version was more in keeping with the book than the first film was.

Unable to escape from being known as the man who created Lecter, Harris again agreed to make not only another novel on the character, but to write the material for the film adaption as well. The current working title is Behind the Mask. As of 2005, Harris resides in Miami, Florida, and Sag Harbor, New York, USA. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Travis Stoffs Trade Mark (1) Hannibal Lecter | Hannibal Wiki | Fandom powered by Wikia Edit Lecter was born in Lithuania in 1933 to a wealthy aristocratic family; his father, simply known as Count Lecter , was a descendant of the warlord " Hannibal the Grim " (1365-1428) who defeated the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Grunwald , in 1410, while his mother, Madame Simonetta Sforza-Lecter , descended from both the Visconti and Sforza families who separately ruled Milan for a total of 250 years. He is the eighth in his blood-line to bear his ancestor's forename.

[2] Lecter may have also been descended from Giuliano Bevisangue ("Bevisangue" means "Blood-Drinker"), a feared and ruthless figure in 12th-century Tuscany , and from the Machiavelli bloodline. Lecter himself would pursue this subject, to determine from the records of the Capponi Library if there was any true connection to Bevisangue, but he was unable to answer the question. Lecter was a distant cousin of the artist Balthus . [3] Childhood and Bereavement Edit When Lecter was six years old, he was introduced to his sister, Mischa , who was born in 1939. The two formed a strong, affectionate bond. When he was eight, his family left their estate to live in a lodge in the forest in order to escape Hitler 's Blitzkrieg . Three years later, his parents, tutor, and family retainers were killed by a German bomber attempting to disable a Soviet tank (decades later while flying between Europe and the United States, Hannibal dreamed of being six at the time of these events).

[2] The lodge was invaded by a group of former Lithuanian collaborators turned looters. Lecter and Mischa were held captive by said looters. Mischa was cannibalized, but Lecter escaped, only to be severely traumatized by his sister's death and was rendered mute. Mischa's death would haunt Lecter for the rest of his life; Hannibal explains that it destroyed his faith in God, and thereafter he believed that there was no real justice in the world. [2] After the looters fled, he wandered the forests until he was found by a tank crew. The soldiers cut the shackle from his neck, which had stripped away pieces of his skin, leaving a scar that would never truly heal. He was also carrying, at this time, his father's binoculars: the binoculars stayed with him for many years and featured again later. [2] The Soviets returned Lecter to his family's castle, which had been converted into an orphanage. The war had many lasting effects on the children, and many of them became bullies. While living there, he frequently attacked and severely wounded many of his fellow orphans, but only those who bullied, hurt or insulted others.

Lecter called on his memories of the leader of the group of looters, Vladis Grutas , to inspire the anger necessary to hurt the bullies. He was well-behaved around the younger orphans, often letting them tease him a little, letting them believe him to be a crazed deaf-mute, and giving them his treats that he rarely received. [2] Adoption and Revenge Edit When Lecter was 13 years old, his uncle (the new Count Robert Lecter ) brought him to his home in France. He formed a close relationship with his aunt, the Lady Murasaki , with whom he instantly fell in love. He was educated at home on his uncle's estate on the banks of the Essonne ; his uncle encouraged him to take up painting while his aunt taught him aspects of Japanese culture. Still mute and disturbed by his sister's death, he saw the psychiatrist, Doctor Rufin . At age 13, he attacked a local butcher, Paul Momund , in retaliation for an obscene insult to his aunt. Robert Lecter died from a heart attack during a further confrontation with Momund.

An enraged Lecter then committed his first murder, slashing Momund with a Tanto that had belonged to his aunt's samurai ancestor, Date Masamune. He then beheaded Momund and, after receiving a tip from his aunt's chef whilst they prepared a fish, sliced off his victim's cheeks and ate them, his first willful act of cannibalism. He then presented the decapitated head to Masamune. The murder brought Lecter to the attention of Inspector Pascal Popil , who intuitively grasped that he was guilty and pressed him to confess. Lecter proved impenetrable, however, even passing a lie detector test; thanks to Lady Murasaki's intervention, he escaped any blame. Following her husband's death, Lady Murasaki moved to a flat in Paris, where Lecter attended a boarding school. Popil, who was fascinated by both Lecter and Lady Murasaki, remained in close contact with them. [2] Lecter excelled at the Lycée and graduated early, becoming the youngest person admitted to a medical school in France, where he was mentored by a Doctor Dumas.

He had been alerted to the survival of the Totenkopfs who had held him prisoner, when he found a painting looted from his father's collection for sale in a Paris gallery. [2] In 1951, he returned to Lithuania and the scene of his sister's murder. He excavated the ruins of the lodge where his family died and, upon finding Mischa's remains, gave her a proper burial. He also unearthed the dog-tags of the group of deserters who had killed her. One member of the group, Enrikas Dortlich , now an officer in the Soviet Border Guards, arrived at the scene intent on killing Lecter. Lecter, however, was not caught off guard and instead murdered Dortlich. Once again, Lecter consumed his victim's cheeks. [2] Dortlich's murder put the group on alert and, due to the similarity of Lecter's first murder, placed him under renewed suspicion from Popil. Grutas dispatched a second member of the group, Zigmas Milko , to eliminate the problem by either bribing Lecter or killing him. Lecter killed Milko instead, drowning him in formaldehyde.

Both Popil and Lady Murasaki try to dissuade him from hunting the gang. During a confrontation with Lady Murasaki, Lecter almost had sex with her, but relented at the last minute, claiming he had made a promise to Mischa. He attacked Grutas in his home but Grutas was rescued by his bodyguards. Grutas kidnapped Lady Murasaki and used her as a lure to draw Lecter to his death. Lecter, donning the Tanto, tracked Grutas to his houseboat. In a final confrontation, Grutas claimed that Lecter too had consumed his sister in broth fed to him by the soldiers, and it was to keep this fact secret that he was killing them. Enraged, Lecter eviscerated him by repeatedly carving his sister's initial into his body. Lady Murasaki was disturbed by his behavior and fled from him even after he told her that he loved her. [2] Popil arrested Lecter for the murders, but there was little incentive for a trial; no evidence could be conclusively tied to him, and all the victims had been slavers and war criminals.

His victims' association with the Nazis led Lecter to become something of a cause celebre in France, with communists and students marching for his release. Lady Murasaki visited him one last time while he was being held by the police, and saw that he had become completely emotionless. After receiving references from Doctor Dumas and from the head of the Police Forensic Laboratory, for whom he has worked as a volunteer, Lecter was released. He left France, killing the final member of the group, Bronys Grentz , while on a vacation in Montreal, before returning to his internship in Baltimore. [2] Career as a psychiatrist Edit Lecter's drawings led to an internship at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland, where he graduated with a degree in medicine and eventually settled. As written in Red Dragon, Lecter established a psychiatric practice in Baltimore in the 1970s. He became a leading figure in Baltimore society and indulged his extravagant tastes, which he financed by influencing some of his patients to bequeath him large sums of money in their wills.

He became world-renowned as a brilliant clinical psychiatrist, but he had nothing but disdain for psychology; he would later say he didn't consider it a science, criticizing it as "puerile", and comment that most psychology departments were filled with "ham radio enthusiasts and other personality-deficient buffs". [4] Killing spree Edit Lecter killed at least nine people before his capture. He also attempted to kill three others, including Will Graham , an FBI profiler, [4] and Mason Verger . Verger went through psychiatric counseling with Lecter as part of a court-order after being convicted of child molestation, and for viciously raping his own sister, Margot, who also went to Lecter for counseling. Verger invited Lecter to his home in Owings Mills one night after a session. Lecter drugged Verger and suggested he try cutting off his own face with a mirror shard. Verger complied and, again at Lecter's suggestion, fed some of his face to his Dobermans and ate his own nose. Lecter then broke Verger's neck with a rope used for auto-erotic asphyxiation and left him to die.

Later, the dogs were taken to an animal shelter to have their stomachs pumped which led to the retrieval of Verger's nose, lips and parts of his forehead; however, the skin graft was unsuccessful. Verger survived, but was left hideously disfigured and forever confined to a life support machine. [3] Benjamin Raspail was Lecter's ninth and final (known) victim in the Chesapeake series before his incarceration. Raspail was a not-so-talented flautist with the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra, and it is believed that Lecter killed him because his musicianship, or lack thereof, spoiled the orchestra's concerts; he was also a patient of Lecter's. Lecter would claim to Clarice Starling that the reason for Raspail's death was that Lecter "got sick and tired of his whining" during their appointments. Raspail's body would be discovered sitting in a church pew with his thymus and pancreas missing, and his heart pierced. It is believed Lecter served these organs at a dinner party he held for the orchestra's board of directors. The president of the board was later to have developed an alcohol problem and anorexia.

Raspail was the former lover of Jame Gumb , who would later be involved in Lecter's life as the serial killer dubbed "Buffalo Bill". [5] Not much is known about his other victims or how they were killed. They can be presumed to have been mutilated and in most cases, eaten. In at least one case, he prepared his victim as an eloquent meal and shared his remains with the victim's fellow musicians. Victims included a person who initially survived, and was taken to a private mental hospital in Denver, Colorado. Others included a bow hunter, a census taker whose liver he ate with "fava beans and a big Amarone", and a Princeton student whom he buried. Lecter was given sodium amytal by the FBI in the hopes of learning where he buried the student; but Lecter, instead of giving them the location of the buried student, gave them a recipe for potato chip dip, the implication being that the student was in the dip. He had trained himself previously by administering self-hypnosis in case he was ever administered hypnotic drugs. Lecter committed his last three known murders within a nine day span.

[4] Since one officer retired after seeing Lecter's basement, it can be presumed that parts of his victims were stored there. Capture Edit Lecter was caught in March or April 1975 by FBI Special Investigator Will Graham. Graham was investigating a series of murders in the Baltimore area committed by a cannibalistic serial killer, and had sought Lecter out after discovering he'd treated one of the victims for a hunting wound. When Graham questioned Lecter at his psychiatric practice, he noticed some antique medical books in his office. Upon seeing these, Graham knew Lecter was the killer he sought; the sixth victim had been killed in his workshop and laced to a pegboard in a manner reminiscent of Wound Man , an illustration used in many early medical books. Graham realized that the hunting wound that led him to Lecter was similar to one in the illustration which inspired Lecter to further emulate the illustration. Graham left to call the police, but Lecter crept up from behind and stabbed him with a linoleum knife, nearly disemboweling him. However, Graham managed to survive the encounter, while Lecter was then apprehended by FBI agents and Maryland State Troopers.

After Lecter's arrest, Graham was briefly committed to a mental institution and retired upon recovering from his wounds. [4] Ironically, the sixth victim that exposed Lecter was not eaten. The courts found Lecter insane; this spared him the death penalty. He was instead sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane for nine consecutive life terms, under administrator Frederick Chilton . Many of the families of his victims pursued lawsuits against Lecter to have their files destroyed. The FBI exhumed the graves of four patients who had died under Lecter's care for further investigation into the cause of their deaths. He was nicknamed "Hannibal the Cannibal" in the National Tattler, a tabloid that also published unauthorized photos of Graham in the hospital after being attacked by Lecter. Another officer retired from the FBI after being the first to discover Lecter's basement. Lecter's electroencephalogram (EEG) showed an unusual pattern and, given his history, was ultimately branded "a pure sociopath" by Chilton, although this was because they did not know what to call him. Many in the field of psychiatry labeled him a "monster".

The National Tattler described Lecter's crimes as "unspeakable practices". [5] Incarceration Edit Lecter, while in custody, was said to be "far too sophisticated" for most forms of psychological evaluation, especially as he enjoyed staying abreast of all of the latest developments in his field. Since he knew how the tests worked, he could easily come up with the typical answers that would brand him as not being psychologically disturbed, and he also mocked the psychiatrists' attempts to profile him by folding their tests into origami. [5] Lecter was a model patient until the afternoon of July 8, 1976. After complaining of chest pains, he was taken to the infirmary. After his restraints were removed for his electrocardiogram (ECG) he attacked a nurse, tearing out an eye, dislocating her jaw, and biting out her tongue and eating it. Chilton would later note that Lecter's pulse never went above 85 beats per minute "even when he swallowed [her tongue]." During the struggle with the orderlies, his shoulder was dislocated.

Following the incident, Lecter was treated very carefully by the hospital staff, often outfitted with heavy restraints, a straitjacket and muzzle, and transported only when strapped to a hand-truck. His cell consisted of a double barrier, the first being standard bars and the second a nylon net stretched across. Despite this high security measures, Lecter managed to create a handcuff key from two pens left in his cell by visitors. [5] Chilton and Lecter's relationship was marked by mutual hatred; Chilton's status as a psychologist, his mediocrity and inflated self-importance offended Lecter, who often humiliated his keeper; while Lecter's constant mockery and elusiveness infuriated Chilton, who punished him by removing his books and toilet seat. At the end of Red Dragon, Lecter diagnosed this form of punishment as indicative of the damnation of society by half-measures: "Any rational society would kill me, or give me my books." By contrast, Lecter reached a mutual respect with his primary caregiver and warden, Barney Matthews , and the two often shared thoughts over Barney's correspondence courses. During the investigation of Buffalo Bill, the two would also discuss Clarice Starling.

It is also implied at the end of the novel and of the film adaptation that Lecter seeks revenge on Chilton for the mistreatment that he endured at Chesapeake. [5] During his stay in Baltimore State Hospital, Lecter would help with two FBI cases. Graham came out of retirement in 1978 to offer his insight on the "Tooth Fairy" case and upon arriving at a dead end, went to Lecter for help,, but before Graham went into retirement. Lecter gave Graham some valuable insights into the Tooth Fairy, but upon learning about the case, secretly sent a coded message to the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, to kill Graham and his family (which would later result in Graham's permanent disfigurement). [4] Escape Edit Five years later, Jack Crawford sent FBI trainee Clarice Starling to Lecter to administer a psychological questionnaire. Starling, initially assuming the assignment was related to her studies, ended up getting him to help the FBI in the Buffalo Bill case. In both of these cases, Lecter used wordplay and subtle clues to help Graham and Starling arrive at the conclusions themselves. [5] Buffalo Bill's last kidnappee was Catherine Martin , daughter of Senator Ruth Martin .

Lecter told Chilton he would reveal Buffalo Bill's real name to Martin and was promptly flown to Memphis, Tennessee, and held at the Shelby County Courthouse. During his stay in Memphis, Lecter lied to Martin, giving her the fake name "William Rubin," or "Billy Rubin". (Bilirubin is a pigment found in feces. It is the same color as Chilton's hair, Lecter's hint that the name was fake. The film adaptation changed the name to "Louis Friend," an anagram for "iron sulfide" - fool's gold.) Starling then visited Lecter at his makeshift cell, and he gave her some final clues before making a bloody escape, killing two police officers during the ordeal. He escaped by making a "mask" from the face of one of the officers, donning the officer's uniform and pretending to be his own still-living victim so that he would be hurried away by ambulance while the authorities hunted for him. [5] He also murdered two paramedics and a touirst, stealing the latter's clothes and identity. Life on the Run Edit After plastic surgery and the removal of a distinctive sixth finger, Lecter relocated in Florence, Italy.

Lecter avoided reconstruction of his nose to protect his uncanny perception of fragrances. In Florence, he took the pseudonym "Dr. Fell," possibly a reference to the Tom Brown translation of Martial's epigram "Non amo te, Sabidi" ("I do not love thee, Doctor Fell / The reason why, I cannot tell." Fell also means "cruel" or "fierce") As Dr. Fell, Lecter's dazzling charm and expertise won him the recently vacated position of museum curator; Lecter had, of course, murdered the position's previous occupant. [5] Lecter's identity would be discovered by Florence detective Rinaldo Pazzi seven years after his escape from Memphis. Lecter had been going by the false name Dr. Fell and Pazzi, who had been disgraced when he bungled the " Il Mostro " case, saw a chance for redemption when he realized Dr. Fell's true identity. Pazzi struck a deal with Lecter's sole surviving victim, Mason Verger to get the doctor alive so that Verger could exact his revenge by feeding Lecter to a group of specially trained boars.

In his efforts to capture Lecter, Pazzi found himself the doctor's prisoner, and he informed Lecter of his plot. After disemboweling and hanging Pazzi, Lecter returned to the United States. Both Verger and Starling would hunt him, hoping to get to him before the other. Lecter was captured by Verger's men, but Starling rescued him. In the ensuing fight, Verger's men shot her with two darts filled with sedatives. Lecter carried her away from the boars and convinced Margot Verger to kill her brother. Lecter left a voice message claiming responsibility for Verger's death. [5] Lecter kept Starling in total isolation during the next few months, subjecting her to various conditioning techniques in order to systematically replace Starling's memories and personality and make her believe she was Mischa. After breaking Starling down, Lecter kidnapped her nemesis, Paul Krendler, who was trying to discredit her, as a final test.

At the rented home that Lecter was living in, Lecter performed a craniotomy on a drugged Krendler and tastefully prepared and shared his brains with Starling and Krendler himself while Krendler was still alive. [5] However, Lecter's plan to brainwash Starling ultimately failed, as he utterly underestimated her strong will; Starling refused to have her own personality sublimated, mocking his efforts to turn her into his sister. Then, she exposed her breast to Lecter and seduced him. [5] The couple then vanished. In 1993, Lecter's former caretaker, Barney Matthews, spotted the two in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is stated on the last page of the novel that both Lecter and Starling were capable of murder at any time; in essence, whatever of Lecter's conditioning took created a "counterpart" of himself in Starling. [5] Characteristics Edit The relatively short relationship between Graham and Lecter is marked by mutual hatred. By the end of Red Dragon, Lecter is directly responsible for ruining Graham's life twice - nearly causing the deaths of Graham's wife and stepson as well.

Prior to Red Dragon, Graham had only met Lecter twice, both times very briefly, for Graham to ask Lecter routine questions; however, during their second meeting, Graham realized that Lecter was the killer he'd been seeking. When Graham left to call in reinforcements, Lecter snuck up behind Graham, gutted him, and escaped for a brief period before authorities ultimately caught him. This was only the first time that Lecter would cause Graham's hospitalization; the second time would be by proxy, through Francis Dolarhyde. After his life was ruined for the second time, Graham sank into an alcoholic depression in Florida. Eventually Jack Crawford and the others at the FBI, along with everyone else, stopped visiting because they saw that Will was killing himself and there was nothing they could do - it was too hard on them to see this empty shell of what Graham used to be. Clarice Starling Edit While Graham was the protagonist of Red Dragon only, Clarice Starling is the protagonist of both The Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal. Starling and Lecter's very long romance began with Starling's assignment from Jack Crawford to interview Dr.

Hannibal Lecter - to quote Thomas Harris himself, " "How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home." Lecter has been in love with Starling ever since this first meeting, although he tried very hard to hide his obsession from her, as he didn't want Starling to know the power she had over him. Lecter was frightened and frustrated by the fact that he'd fallen in love with this "trainee", and tried to send her away; ultimately though, Lecter found that he wanted to help her. Starling succeeded against all expectations, and was promoted to the status of full FBI agent because of her killing of Jame Gumb, who Lecter helped her to find. Even after Lecter's bloody escape, Starling somehow instinctually knew that he would never hurt her. A few weeks later Lecter sent Starling a letter confirming that she had nothing to fear from him. Truly, Lecter would never be able to bring himself to harm Starling, and he would only enter her life again years later when he saw she needed his help.

Lecter's letter ended with the phrase "Some of our stars are the same." This bears a certainly resemblance to the famous letter written by one of the men who tried to scale Everest to his wife, which said "Goodnight and great love to you. We see the same stars." This appears to be another roundabout way of Lecter's to tell Clarice that he loves her, similar to how, in Memphis, he told her "People will say we're in love," as though he couldn't quite bring himself to say the actual words. As we learn more about Lecter's past in Hannibal Rising, it appears that Lecter's reluctance to say the words "I love you" stems from his aunt's rejection of him the two times he told her "I love you." Nearly seven years after their physical parting in Memphis, Starling - whose career has not been nearly as successful as her bright start would have indicated - has been suspended from the FBI, and is about to be kicked out entirely.

Suddenly she receives a letter from Lecter, from which she finds encouragement and because of which the FBI is forced to allow Starling to not only stay in the FBI, but to allow her into Behavioral Science, the place she'd always wanted to be, as this is the first trace of Lecter they'd had in nearly seven years. Starling is hunting Lecter for the FBI (or so she wants to think; but we're told by Harris that "The truth was more complicated than that.") but Lecter is also being hunted by his former "victim", Mason Verger, who intends to torture and kill Lecter. The ensuing manhunt comes to a head when Verger's men capture Lecter as he is leaving a birthday gift for Starling. When Clarice tries to tell her "superiors" that Hannibal Lecter was just kidnapped by Verger's people, they don't believe her. Back at home, Starling remembers the encouraging things Lecter had said to her, and then she thinks about Mason torturing him to death. She can't help seeing Lecter as a lamb who needs to be saved. So Starling goes on her own to rescue Lecter.

In the ensuing fight at the Verger farm, Starling enters the barn where Lecter is tied up - ready to be fed to the pigs waiting at the gate. Starling shoots and kills what she thinks are all of the Sardinians in Mason's employ, then proceeds to work on freeing Lecter from his restraints. However, one of the Sardinians is still alive and shoots at Starling with the tranquilizer gun meant for the pigs. Lecter warns Starling about the other Sardinian in time for her to whip around and shoot him, but his tranquilizer still catches her. By this time the pigs have managed to get into the barn themselves, but Lecter finishes freeing himself in time to lift Starling into his arms and carry her to safety. Lecter and Starling spend a few weeks together at a house on the Chesapeake where he cooks for her, plays the harpsichord for her, and closely monitors her recovery - her physical recovery from the effects of the two tranquilizer darts she was hit with, and her psychological "recovery" from the death of her father, as she never really let herself accept and grieve his death.

Lecter also tells Starling about his sister Mischa during this time. After Lecter makes dinner one night for himself and Starling partially from her nemesis, Paul Krendler, Starling and Lecter are sitting together in the drawing room, talking about "teacups and time". Lecter finally tells Starling his desperate hope to bring Mischa back to life. Starling sympathizes with him, but she also puts him in his place, pointing out to Lecter that they've spent the last few weeks together finding the solution to her acceptance of her own father's death. Starling tells Lecter that if, as he himself told her, there is room within Starling for her father's memory, then there must also be room within Lecter for his sister's memory. Lecter is eagerly ready to accept this solution. Then Starling experiences an epiphany of sorts, and realizes what Lecter really needs/wants. She reaches into the neckline of her dress and frees her breast, meeting Lecter's eyes the whole time. At her invitation, he swiftly comes to kneel on his knees in front of her chair and takes her breast into his mouth. They become lovers and disappear together.

The next time we see "our couple" - as Thomas Harris calls them - is three years later, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Barney, the former orderly, and his new girlfriend Lillian Hersh encounter Lecter and Starling at the Teatro Colon opera house. Barney sees Lecter and Starling completely absorbed in each other, and it is unknown if they were aware of his presence or not. Barney is able to convince Lillian to leave with him immediately without telling her why, and, presumably, Barney never told anyone about this encounter. We're then given a glimpse into Lecter and Starling's home life: They live together in a wonderful Beaux-arts building near the French embassy in Buenos Aires; the servants in their household have a high morale, but there is an iron discipline among them; Lecter and Starling often speak at dinnertime in languages other than Starling's native English, especially Italian, as she finds a curious freedom in the visual nuances of the language; They often dance at dinnertime, too. We're told that "Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day." So, they have a very active and healthy sex life together as well.

We're told that Clarice has a memory palace of her own, and that it is filled with pleasant things: her father; the horse, Hannah, that she had as a child; and even Jack Crawford, "when she chooses to see him." We're told that Clarice and Hannibal's memory palaces have many rooms in common, although hers grows on its own. The novel, and the series, closes with Harris telling us that we must leave, while Hannibal and Clarice are dancing together on the terrace, as "the wise Barney has already left town, and we must follow his example," because "For either of them to discover us would be fatal." Physical Apperance Edit Lecter was a small and sleek man but was deceptively strong. His left hand had a condition called mid ray duplication polydactyly, i.e. a duplicated middle finger. [5] He later performed plastic surgery on his own face on several occasions and removes his extra digit. [3] Lecter's eyes were a shade of maroon and reflected the light in "pinpoints of red". He also had small white teeth and dark, slicked-back hair with a widow's peak.

[5] Personality Review: Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris | Books | The Guardian by Thomas Harris Weidenfeld & Nicolson £17.99, pp325 The brothers Grimm have a lot to answer for. The most powerful part of Hannibal Rising, the long-awaited fourth novel about the cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter , is the first section, which is, in essence, a Second World War version of the story of Hansel and Gretel. But Thomas Harris makes other literary connections in this often chilling, sometimes ludicrous but always entertaining account of how Lecter's childhood made him 'death's prodigy'. Later in the story Lecter conceives a passion for his widowed aunt, Lady Murasaki. Harris points out in his afterword that she shares the name of the medieval Japanese writer Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote one of the first great novels, The Tale of Genji. Harris borrows Coleridge's dog and there is a French doctor called Dumas. There's even an ill-used Philip Larkin epigraph. At times these literary allusions add depth, at others it seems that Harris is simply having fun.

Lecter as a descendant of Hannibal the Grim, ruthless medieval Lithuanian ruler, is a pretty obvious pointer to the Grimm Brothers. The novel starts in the castle of Hannibal the Grim in 1944. The Lecter family are preparing to abandon it to take refuge in their forest hunting lodge to avoid the savage conflict between the retreating Germans and the advancing Russians. The lodge isn't made of gingerbread but pretty soon, after the killing of the rest of the family, six-year-old Hannibal and his sister Mischa, three, are heading for the cooking pot of a band of starving deserters. Mischa is eaten; Hannibal survives, mute with a chain around his neck. Lecter ends up in an orphanage in his family's sequestered castle until he is adopted by his wealthy artist uncle, who has a beautiful, cultured Japanese wife. As he grows up, signs of Lecter's inhuman nature begin to show. Then, at the age of 18, he sets out to wreak revenge on those who ate his sister.

(It's hard to write a sentence like that without laughing but that's the thing about Hannibal Rising - everything is so heightened it can tip over into black farce.) Jung made much of the dark forest as a representation of the id but the only way we get inside Lecter's head is through Harris's adoption of the Renaissance idea of the palace of memory, in which each room houses objects linked to specific memories. In the novel Lecter first avoids the room of beginnings, in which his memories of the horrors of the dark forest reside, then strains to enter it. It's an interesting notion but the problem for readers is that we know what is in that room, so suspense is lost as we wait for Lecter to catch up. When he does remember, he sets about tracking down the men responsible for those horrors. Unfortunately he then comes across more as a young James Bond than a young Hannibal, especially when trying to rescue a damsel in distress from half a dozen ruthless war veterans. Other ludicrous elements include Lecter and Lady Murasaki conversing in haikus to the sound of Japanese lute music. This novel may be flawed, but Lecter remains a powerful, iconic creation, especially thanks to Anthony Hopkins's screen incarnation.

Lecter has been compared to Milton's Lucifer and Goethe's Mephistopheles. But here, as the novel ends, he is more like Dracula, coming out of the forests of eastern Europe to bring his evil to an unsuspecting west. The Real Life Doctor That Inspired Character of Hannibal Lecter Will Haunt Your Dreams | Complex The Real Life Doctor That Inspired Character of Hannibal Lecter Will Haunt Your Dreams 0 As if we needed any more things in this world to have nightmares about. According to UK's The Daily Mail , The Silence of the Lambs author Thomas Harris has revealed the real-life inspiration behind one of modern popular culture's most celebrated, demented characters, Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Harris wouldn't give a full name, opting instead to just refer to him as "Dr. Salazar," but he did offer this chilling anecdote about the time he met the guy at a Mexican prison in the '60s: It was as a 23-year-old reporter working for Argosy magazine in the 1960s that Harris encountered a man he identifies only as “Dr.

Salazar” after being sent to the Nuevo Leon State Prison at Monterrey, Mexico, to interview a separate inmate. Harris was asked by the magazine to interview mental patient Dykes Askew Simmons who was under a death sentence for killing three young people. The author tells how Simmons had attempted to escape the prison a year earlier by bribing a prison guard to leave a door unlocked and provide him with a pistol. But the guard betrayed him, taking his money, keeping the door locked and shooting him down. He was only saved by the skilled prison doctor saved him, Harris added. Aww shit, here it comes. The author recalls interviewing Dr Salazar, which he later explains is not his real name, about how he treated the gunshot wounds and stopped the bleeding. But he describes how the conversation took a much darker twist when the doctor began questioning the journalist on Simmons’s disfigured appearance, the nature of torment and the murderer’s victims. It was not until Harris left the doctor’s office that he learned of Dr Salazar’s history from the prison warden. The doctor was a murderer and the warden told Harris: ‘He will never leave this place. He is insane.” But wait, there's more!

From the UK's WalesOnline : The warden told him as they were leaving: "The doctor is a murderer. As a surgeon, he could package his victim in a surprisingly small box." [...] But the warden added he was “not insane with the poor” and was trusted with patients and was visited by Mexican townspeople from outside the confines of the prison...Harris said Dr Salazar served 20 years in prison and after his release went on to serve the aged and poor in the poorest neighbourhood in Monterrey. He added his real name is not Dr Salazar, saying: “I leave him in peace.” So the guy that was too insane to ever "leave this place" did, in fact, one day leave said place. NIGHTMARES YET? Thomas Harris, Mississippi writer and author of Hannibal Rising, Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Black Sunday Biography of Thomas Harris (1999) by Teal Waterstrat (SHS) Thomas Harris, author of three national bestsellers, was born in Jackson, Tennessee, but moved to Rich, Mississippi, with his parents, William and Polly, early in his life.

He attended Clarksdale High School, where his mother taught biology. His mother reports that he spent most of his time reading and writing, and that Hemmingway was a favorite writer. Not much information is available about the life of Harris, but after high school, he went to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, to earn a major in English. While in Waco he worked for the Herald Tribune as a police reporter but found it very unimaginative. While at Baylor, he wrote numerous stories to magazines like True and Argosy that were gothic and detailed. During this time Harris met his wife Harriet and they had a daughter named Anne before they divorced in the 60’s. His father died during this period of his life as well. After college Harris moved to New York and held a job as editor for the Associated Press in New York. His experiences as a crime reporter gave him information he used in his later writings. His first book, Black Sunday, is about Arab terrorist and a Vietnam veteran who try to bomb the Super Bowl. Published in 1975, the book became a best seller and a successful movie.

Harris does a lot of research for his fiction, so his second book Red Dragon was not published until 1981. This novel is the story of an FBI agent’s search for a serial killer and contains Harris’s character psychotic psychiatrist Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter. Red Dragon also became a popular movie called Manhunter. The third novel written by Harris is considered a masterpiece of suspense by many people. The Silence of the Lambs was published in 1988 and includes madmen and a strong-willed female. The film made from the book won five Academy Awards. Harris has homes in Rich, Mississippi; Long Island, New York; and Miami, Florida. His mother, with whom he keeps in close contact, says she likes his work and she is not frightened by it! Harris closely guards his privacy. Thomas Harris is known for his painstaking detail in his writing. The detail is so vivid that the story almost seems to make pictures in the mind of the reader. Because of his attention to detail, Harris takes a long time to write his novels. Biography of Thomas Harris (2001) By Joe Underwood (SHS) Finding information about the author Thomas Harris is difficult.

He is like the uncatchable serial killer that he so vividly writes about in his novels. As his novels progress, the reader becomes more aware of who the killer is. Similarly, little by little information about Harris has been revealed about his life, but he tends to avoid the spotlight. Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee, to William and Polly Harris but moved to Rich, Mississippi, his father’s hometown, early in his life. He attended Lula Rich school through the tenth grade, at which time he transferred to Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Mississippi. It was not until the last semester of his senior year that he transferred to Clarksdale High School, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where his mother taught biology.(Edwards). After high school, Harris went to Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he pursued a major in English and worked as a reporter for the News-Tribune. Also, while attending Baylor, he met fellow student Harriet whom he married. They had one daughter, Anne, before they divorced in the 1960s.

After graduating from college, Harris spent a brief period traveling through Europe (Seibels) before landing a job as general assignment reporter with theNew York Associated Press from 1968 to 1974. It was this job that gave him his valuable insights into the world of crime. From this experience came his first novel, Black Sunday, in 1975. Black Sunday is about an Arab terrorist and a crazed,Vietnam veteran who try to bomb the Super Bowl. The success of the book and the movie it was made into prompted Harris to become a full time writer. Because Harris pays so much attention to detail, his next book, Red Dragon, was not published until 1981. This story introduces the character Hannibal Lecter to whom many fans and web sites are devoted today. Red Dragon was also made into a successful movie called Manhunter. The introduction of Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter paved the way for what is Harris’s great work The Silence of the Lambs (Shirley 56).

The Silence of the Lambs, released in 1988, was a huge success and prompted a movie which earned five Academy Awards, including best actor (Anthony Hopkins), best actress (Jodie Foster), best screenplay (Ted Tally), best director (Demme), and best picture (Seibels). Silence of the Lambs created a huge demand for a sequel, which came out in 1999 called Hannibal. It is the continuing story of Hannibal Lecter, who has escaped and is on the run again with Clarice Starling once again on his heels. It also has been made into a movie. Harris now has homes in Rich, Mississippi; Long Island, New York; and Miami, Florida. His mother, with whom he keeps in close contact and who still lives in Mississippi, says she likes his work; and she is not frightened by it! Harris closely guards his privacy. ——————————————- UPDATE 2015: Hannibal Rising was published in 2006. Four of his novels have been made into major motion pictures. In 2007 he won the HWA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD at the World Horror Convention in Toronto, Canada.

Harris avoids publicity so not much is known about him. His last interview was in 1976. He does like cooking and has done Cordon Bleu exams. It is said that Harris remained close to his mother Polly and often discussed his work with her. She died in 2011. Harris currently lives in South Florida and has a summer home in Sag Harbor, New York. by Joe Underwood (SHS) Joe Underwood, SHS Researcher Though not what I expected this book to be, Hannibal is well worth reading, that is if you have lots of free time. Critics are right when they say Thomas Harris goes into much detail. In fact, that is basically what the whole first half of the novel is, a whole lot of detail. The story opens up where Silence of the Lambs left off, with Clarice Starling still on the FBI and Hannibal Lecter having escaped from his transport to a federal penitentiary in Memphis, Tennessee. Clarice is having problems with the FBI after a disastrous drug raid in which she ends up shooting a woman, who was the head of the drug operation, carrying a child.

This causes a public outcry and, of course, the FBI needs someone to blame the incident on. The the media have already formed its own opinion of what has happened and runs stories calling Clarice a killer, which prompts Lecter to write her a letter to “keep in good spirits.” Now here is where the plot starts. One of Lecters’ early victims, Mason Verger, who somehow miraculously survived but is bed bound for life and hideously disfigured, wants revenge. Since he is a millionaire and has pull in Congress, he follows the continuing search for Lecter through the FBI and is conducting a private one of his own. Mason has put all kinds of rewards on Lecter hoping somebody will find him. Mason’s plan is to capture Lecter and slowly torture him to death by having him eaten by a pack of wild boars. Mason knows Clarice has had contact from Lecter and hopes he can somehow lure Lecter out of hiding by using her, so he uses his pull in Congress to drop her charges. While Clarice is on the hunt for Lecter, an inspector in Florence, Italy, named Rinaldo Pazzie discovers Lecter. Pazzie contacts Verger and wants to collect the bounty.

Verger then sends over a professional kidnapping team to capture Lecter alive. The whole thing goes sour, and Hannibal ends up getting away and Pazzie is killed. After his escape from capture in Florance, Lecter heads back to the U.S. to go back into hiding. Mason expects this move and uses his influence in the FBI to get Clarice suspended. This event causes Lecter to come out of hiding to try and make contact with Clarice; and when he does, Mason’s men capture him. To find out what happens next, you’ll just have to read the book. All in all, Hannibal was a good book. I had a little trouble getting into it, but once I had finished about half the book, the action started to pick up a bit, and it was harder to put the book down.

Question: Name the author who created Hannibal Lecter?
Answer: Thomas Harris