The Silence of the Lambs

"Yes, absolutely. If you want to be a crime writer it is one of the books that you absolutely have to read. It has been one of the most successful, if not the most successful, crime novel of the 20th century. You could argue that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is as well, but I think this book is infinitely superior. Because it is a far better researched book that works on many different levels. One of the things it does, in a way that Stieg Larsson doesn’t, is to love all its characters. In Hannibal Lecter you have this appalling monster and yet you have a sneaking admiration for him. There is this idea of setting a monster to catch a monster. Yes, there is a sexual frisson there, as well as him wanting to help her. I read this book for the first time in a hotel in Thailand and I was so bloody scared I had to sleep with the light on. The book is infinitely scarier than the film. “In Hannibal Lecter you have this appalling monster and yet you have a sneaking admiration for him.” Buffalo Bill is actually based on a real character, and where the author has been so clever is that he hasn’t made him one-dimensional. He has got his pet poodle – something he loves. So you think that if anyone loves something they can’t be all bad. It is an absolutely gripping thriller. My friend James Herbert sent me an early reading copy of it in 1988 and he rang me and said, “I am sending you this reading copy, you have got to read it.” And I read it over the next couple of days and put it down and thought, “That is a book I wish I had written!”"

"I was going to have Le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl but I think Le Carré’s overrated and I think Thomas Harris is underrated. Hannibal Lecter is such a compelling character but he only actually appears on about 30 pages of the book. I mean, Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for the role, not Best Supporting Actor, and he was on screen for about 13 minutes. He has a tiny amount of dialogue but totally dominates the film. Again this has elements of reality in it. He has based Lecter on Ed Gein, a serial killer who robbed graves and killed woman in order to flay the corpses for their skins. Gein was also the basis for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Norman Bates in Psycho. He also uses the real murderer Garry Ridgeway who dumped women’s bodies with objects inside them. Like Forsyth in The Day of the Jackal , Harris breaks a story in that he popularised or exposed the workings of the FBI’s criminal profiling unit. He put them on the map. Nowadays they are always in any crime drama. He also does a lot with names – Clarice Starling, for example. I think Hannibal comments that she has fallen from the nest, underlines her vulnerability. And the name Clarice says she’s from the South. Hannibal Lecter, of course, is probably the best name in fiction, showing his brutality, dominance, and erudition. He’s a horrific killer but would be a great dinner-party guest. All these characters have two sides – Bond is a thug and a seducer, Spade is sleeping with his best friend’s wife while investigating his murder, Bourne is a good-guy assassin. A brilliant central character, a recognisable writing style (Fleming has short sentences and muscularity, Hammett has fantastic dialogue), some link to reality like a real event, character or detailed research, an inanimate object around which the human story revolves, and a news story that breaks as a result of the novel."