“Hannibal” is the “Phantom Menace” of publishing this summer. When Harris unexpectedly delivered the 600-page manuscript in March (years after his deadline), Delacorte scrambled to get the book to press (the fact that Harris takes no editing suggestions is a timesaver). Nobody doubts the novel will be a huge success. The first of a two-book, $5.2 million deal, “Hannibal” has an initial printing of 1.2 million copies. The movie rights have been sold for $10 million. Harris introduced the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist, fava-bean fan and serial killer who cannibalizes his victims, in his second novel, “Red Dragon.” The new book, embargoed by the publisher until the on-sale date, picks up the story seven years after “Silence” ends. Lecter is loose in the world among us; one of his surviving victims lures FBI agent Clarice Starling into a trap as bait to bring Hannibal out of hiding. Insiders say the novel is full of unpredictable plot twists–and a slew of references to gourmet cooking.
Almost as big a mystery as the contents of the long-awaited “Hannibal” is the man who created the monster. Not only won’t Harris talk, but people who know him are very protective of him. One thing everyone will tell you: he’s a guy who loves to cook and to eat. A big man with graying hair, Harris, 58, is soft-spoken, twinkly-eyed and unfailingly polite. Not a true recluse, he entertains friends with both his dinners and his Southern-style storytelling. And his fiction contains plenty of clues about him–his keen intelligence, a gift for writing that exceeds the usual demands of a thriller, his talent for meticulous research. The books also reflect the passions of an oenophile (in the novel “Silence,” it was a “big Amarone”–rarer than the Chianti of the movie–that Lecter drank with the liver and beans) and a lover of literature and art. According to Harris’s mother, Polly, “As a child, he did not want any bats or balls, just another book. He had a little living-room tent with stacks and stacks of books. He would get in there and stay all day until hunger drove him out.”
After college in Texas, Harris got a job as a reporter in Waco. In 1968 he came to New York to work for the Associated Press. Writer Nicholas (“Wiseguy”) Pileggi worked with him there. “Tom was very quiet and cheery,” recalls Pileggi, who says there was no sign of the kind of books he would go on to write. “He did cover a lot of bloody stuff, but we all did.” When things were slow on the night shift, Harris and two colleagues cooked up ideas for best sellers. That’s how “Black Sunday” was born. “He was working on the book all the time,” remembers another former AP writer, Joan Tumpson. “One day out of the blue he asked me, ‘If you were lying down and doctors were working on you and they had on surgical gloves, could you tell if they had nail polish on?’ He just had this byzantine mind for hashing out details.”
After the success of “Black Sunday,” Harris quit the AP to write fiction full time. He now divides his time between Sag Harbor, N.Y., and Miami, and lives with his longtime girlfriend, Pace Barnes, a fellow Southerner who used to work in publishing. “Tom lives more of an upper-middle-class life than a lavish one,” says his agent, Mort Janklow. “He lives the life of the mind.” He’s spent stretches of the last decade in Paris, where he went to Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. One luxury he indulges: he owns both a Porsche and a Jaguar.
The big question is this: how does a guy this charming make up this stuff? “Nobody who writes the kind of books he does is simply sweet and polite,” says one friend. “He’s got a dark streak. He once told me that ‘Blue Velvet’ was his kind of movie.” For Harris, life is research. He spent long hours at the FBI center in Quantico, Va., gathering notes for “Silence.” A visitor to his house once noted that among the movie videos was a tape of an interview with serial killer Ted Bundy. In 1994, he was spotted at the trial in Italy of a man accused of murdering couples in lovers lanes and cannibalizing sex organs. Yet nobody thinks Harris’s interest in his material is obsessive. “He has this imagination that’s just unbridled,” says an old AP colleague, Walter Stovall. “But it’s not anything that roils around in his brain.”
Will “Hannibal” be the last book about Hannibal? The gap between each of Harris’s novels gets longer, and though he is under contract for one more book, it’s not at all clear what he will deliver–or when. “Writing is painful for him,” says a friend. “He doesn’t live to write–he writes to live. And he doesn’t need the money.” But Hannibal has become a franchise. If the new novel measures up to “Silence,” Harris’s fans will be screaming for more.
