Hannibal Lecter’s creator goes to Escobar’s Miami mansion in new book

Thomas Harris, the creator of Hannibal Lecter, is the greatest thriller writer of our time, comparable to the finest melodramatists of the past, from Bram Stoker to Conan Doyle. Nearly 20 years ago I wrote a short book about him and his work, saying why I thought this and admired his work so much. 

At the time he had published just four novels. Black Sunday of 1975, about a terrorist attack on the Super Bowl, was an apprentice piece. The first two Hannibal Lecter novels, Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988), were clear masterpieces, universally acknowledged as such, revolutionising the genre. The much more baroque sequel, Hannibal (1999), alienated some former fans, like Martin Amis, with its mannered indulgence of Lecter’s refined predilections, including his romance with Clarice Starling.

Since then Harris has published a novel with even fewer takers, Hannibal Rising (2006), seeming to explain Lecter’s murderous career by his traumatic childhood. Evidently, Harris must subsequently have consented to, although not been otherwise involved in, the potty spin-off TV serial, Hannibal (2013-2015), starring Mads Mikkelsen, seeming at that point simply to abandon his authorship.

Now, at 78, Harris has suddenly and surprisingly published his first non-Lecter thriller since his debut. Cari Mora is set in Miami, where Harris mostly lives, and offers quite a conventional heist plot, based on a real-life incident. The Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar once owned a pink mansion in Miami Beach, overlooking Biscayne Bay, rumoured to house some of his vast wealth. And indeed, when it was demolished in 2016, it was found that an entire safe had somehow been stolen from beneath the marble flooring before it could be excavated.

This is a novel about that theft. Escobar has hidden a vast safe full of gold beneath the mansion, elaborately booby-trapped with Semtex. Trying to get their hands on it are a Colombian gang — and an insanely evil individual from Paraguay, a monstrous sadist, “tall and pale, totally hairless”, called Hans-Peter Schneider. What they have not counted on is the eponymous heroine, Cari Mora, the housekeeper of the mansion, a precarious immigrant to Miami, also from Colombia.

Harris has always admired courageous women, Reba McClane in Red Dragon, for instance, as well as Clarice Starling. In Cari Mora he has created his ideal. Cari, 25, is irresistibly attractive — “damn fucking good-looking”, another woman comments sourly. She’s also lethal. Cari was kidnapped by the guerrilla movement Farc at the age of 12 and trained as a child soldier. She has witnessed barbarities that have given her all too clear an understanding of human cruelty. Yet she remains kind and loves birds. No one is more formidably equipped to resist a predator such as Schneider.

Harris’s previous monsters, Francis Dolarhyde, Jame Gumb and even Mason Verger, have been dynamic creations with powerful backstories. Schneider, however, arrives so completely repellent as to be unconvincing. “The sound of a woman crying is Hans-Peter’s music; it soothes him and he goes back to sleep,” we are told on the second page. Schneider doesn’t just make women into sex slaves, he tortures and mutilates them first, drawing arty sketches of the amputations he plans. He relishes melting his victims in a “liquid cremation machine”. He murdered his parents in a walk-in freezer and smashed up their bodies. He makes up mad little songs to amuse himself, blows an Aztec death whistle to drown out the Trout Quintet, and eats revoltingly, hating “mealtimes and the ceremonies of the table”, a cardinal sin in itself to Harris.

This time Harris fails to build the suspense and dread of his masterpieces. These two main characters are on the one hand too good and on the other too evil to resonate with one another or the reader. That failure leaves us, nonetheless, with an expertly delivered and fast-paced thriller, full of distinctively Harrisian inflections.

His usual technique of narrating action in the past tense but then switching to an oracular present to describe what people are like, the prevailing conditions of existence, works as well as ever. There’s an extraordinary abundance of imagery from the natural world, here mainly marine and avian, asserting that we are all in the same struggle for survival (there’s a whole chapter carefully describing the diet and digestion of a 14-foot salt-water crocodile). As a deranged man, preaching to a congregation of animals in a care home, urges, “men might see that they themselves are beasts”.

There’s another damaged agent, and another incisive post-mortem examination scene, one of his innovations that spawned a whole crime genre. There’s that constant sensuality, that awareness of appetite and lust. Sparks fly upwards once more. 

So here is that utterly distinctive imaginative world again, operating though at a lower level of creativity than in his best work, so often the outcome of late endeavour (Harris himself seems to be proud of the novel as a tribute to Miami, which he calls in an afterword “savory and beautiful, an intensely American city”, just as he once called Florence “intensely medieval”).

Although it adds little to Harris’s stature, Cari Mora is still a fierce read. So far from his novels fading for me over the years, I have re-read them frequently (especially enjoying Harris’s own intensely Southern readings of them) and always only thought better of them, even Hannibal. 

In the guise of melodrama, they tell severe truth. Just don’t start here. 

Cari Mora by Thomas Harris (Heinemann, £20). Buy it here.