Red Dragon

Red Dragon was published in 1981 and is the novel in which Thomas Harris introduced Hannibal Lecter, a character who went on to dominate three further books and a large part of the culture. Harris had written two earlier novels and had worked as a reporter, and the procedure in the book is specific: interviews at a psychiatric institution, a forensic examination, a trip to a printing plant, and the careful negotiation between an agent and a prisoner who is smarter than he is.

The killer is the book's other half. He is introduced as a man with an ordinary job and a physical deformity, and Harris writes his childhood and his work in a way that gives him a complete psychology rather than a set of symptoms. The novel alternates between Graham's investigation and the killer's preparations, so the reader is waiting for the two to converge, and the climax depends on a false assumption rather than on evidence.

The book was filmed twice, as Manhunter in 1986 and under its own title in 2002, and the second adaptation restored the novel's ending. Hannibal Lecter's appearances in the later books make this the volume where he is still a supporting character, and it is the strongest of the four as a procedural. It can be read without any of the others, which is not true of the books that followed it, and the investigation is largely conducted through interviews, records and a visit to a printing works rather than through action.