To him must be ascribed the monstrous progeny of writers on the detection of crime. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.”Ĭonan Doyle admitted that Poe had been his great influence: “Poe is the master of all. As he tells Clarice: “ ‘You use Evyan skin cream, and sometimes you wear L’Air du Temps, but not today.’” On their next meeting, he detects a Band-Aid under her clothes.Ĭompare Holmes on his first meeting with Watson in A Study In Scarlet: “’You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ ‘How on earth did you know that?’ I asked in astonishment.’ “ When, at their next meeting, Holmes explains his deductions, the amazed Watson says, rightly enough, “You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin. Many of Lecter’s observations are pure Holmes in style, if not content. One of Lecter’s most obvious fictional precursors is Sherlock Holmes and before him, therefore, Poe’s Dupin. Lecter’s antecedents are to be found in fable and fiction, not in hospitals and prison cells.

Like these stories, they still have, of course, an acute psychological reality. The Hannibal Lecter stories have about the same connection to social reality as, say, the stories of Bluebeard or Dracula. He comes not from criminological research, unlike Harris’s other killers, nor from the annals of crime. Hannibal Lecter not only lives in books, he came out of books too. A cannibalised thigh bone was discovered in Gloucestershire, carbon-dated to the first century, prompting a forensic archaeologist at Bournemouth University, Professor Margaret Cox, to say “this is obviously an isolated case of aberrant behaviour, what you might call a British Hannibal Lecter”. Anonymous early Britons have also been nominated. When these searches for the “original Hannibal Lecter” have not prospered, reporters have been sent round the world to interview frankly unrelated murderers and, where possible, cannibals, as generic “real Hannibal Lecters”, including, most recently, 29-year-old Jason Ricketts from Caerphilly in South Wales who murdered and eviscerated a cellmate in Cardiff prison, mistaking his spleen for his heart. It seems likely that he would still have functioned as a bogeyman in the area 10 or 15 years later when Harris was a boy. When he was captured, 200 armed police guarded him he went to the gallows. In 1934, Coyner escaped from an Indiana prison and went on a murder and cannibalism spree in Cleveland.

To a librarian in Cleveland, Mississippi, Harris mentioned a local killer, William Coyner, as his inspiration. The author himself appears to have mentioned a Mexican doctor he interviewed in prison to one of his English publishers. Many a journalist has been set the task of finding the genuine serial killer on whom Thomas Harris’s character - as he appears, variously, in Red Dragon, The Silence Of The Lambs and Hannibal - might have been based. Much print has been expended on attempting to identify “the real Hannibal Lecter”.

Books with hannibal lecter