I picked up my much-thumbed copy of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon this weekend, happy to realize that enough time has passed since my last reading that I can come back to it afresh. And fresh it is–I’m finding that I’d forgotten most of the details, and the details are where Harris is at his wry, observant best. His writing is larded with allusions and references, mainly to the history of crime, but opening up onto all manner of other subjects. What I’m discovering is that the book is enhanced by having a wired computer at hand while one reads it, the better to Google various names and terms. Here are a few interesting trails the first third of the book alone has set me off on:
– Remember how, in the prehistory of Harris’s novels, Will Graham recognized Hannibal Lecter as the killer he was looking for and got him put away? The story is briefly recounted in Red Dragon: during a routine interview with a potential witness, Graham glimpsed a familiar old medical text on a shelf in Lecter’s psychiatric office. He mentally flashed on one of the book’s illustrations, “Wound Man,” an early modern medical training diagram that the killer had reconstructed in a kind of tableau mordant at one of the murder scenes. An excellent detail made more lurid and more educational by the visual aid. And for the record, count me in the camp that believes the otherwise great Anthony Hopkins has turned Lecter less interesting, not more–into a bit of a clown, sadly.
– A reference by a minor character to Joseph Yablonski, previously uncomprehended by me, this time led me to learn a little something about the charming history of the United Mine Workers.
– A reference to Dr. William Beaumont triggered a hazy memory of visiting some museum as a child–it must have been this one–that featured a hypnotically icky set of dioramas depicting the good doctor’s famed experiments on Alexis St. Martin’s open stomach. I could find no web-based evidence that said exhibit still exists, which is truly a shame. Nothing snaps a museum-weary youth’s attention to order quite like a dollhouse figure dangling food on a string into a hole in another doll’s abdomen. Rooting around fruitlessly for evidence that the exhibit lives on, I found this potentially exciting claim (scroll down to “Literature”) that Dr. Beaumont traveled for a time with a far more illustrious Alexis: M. de Tocqueville lui-m