Thomas Harris Prose Bracelet

On lowkey genius, and getting mugged in Little Havana.

1.

On Sunday morning I saw an advertisement for a new book called Hannibal Lecter: A Life, and its author is a guy named Brian Raftery who writes about movies, and pop culture, and who’s probably spent his whole life being called “Rafferty” and then having to tell people “That’s not my name,” or maybe after a certain point just nods and responds to it, such as I know often happens with named Jose: they get called “Juan” their whole life and eventually quit correcting people. I’ve known cases where someone did that for years and then their best friend or significant other saw their license and felt wounded, even betrayed.

The Hannibal Lecter novels by Thomas Harris are among my favorite books ever. I think the first three volumes — Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal — are all masterpieces, each in its own different magnificent way, and I have read the fourth one as well.

Raftery’s book is a semi-biography of Thomas Harris, who’s only given three interviews in a half-century career, so there’s not much public material to pull from. But he does a great job!

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2.

Thomas Harris lives down here on Miami Beach just four miles off my porch. I looked him up and called his house one day in 2024 and asked his wife if he’d be willing to grant an interview.

Harris himself called me back a few days later. He said no to the interview and then wished me luck and we chatted a bit. He was very friendly. At the end of our exchange he said, “Feel free to call,” and I thought maybe he was bluffing, being polite, so I asked some friends and they all agreed: “He’s in his mid-eighties and probably well beyond the point in his life where invites strangers into his phone, just being polite.”

Still I spent two weeks formulating a reason to call him. Finally while reading David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be I came up with an angle.

I called him and we talked about five minutes and then I called another time and we talked about five minutes. Again he was very friendly. There was always a banging noise like he was doing something onerous.

I had a friend in 2020 who worked at a bird sanctuary and I was rhapsodizing about Red Dragon to her one time at a bar called The Mighty. She cocked her head and got all squinty at one point, started mouthing his name over and over with wine at her chin and then she lit up, “Oh wait that’s Tom!” Googled his photo and said “Yep!” Apparently he frequents that sanctuary. Says hello to the people working there and then walks quickly past them toward the birds and when released from their cages they would perch on his wrist and he’d stand there smiling at their feathers a while, not saying much, and then leave.

When I told her this was an amazing story she asked me why it was amazing and I don’t know I guess you have to be me.

Harris, from the New York Times

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3.

Probably part of the reason Harris has been so remote is he was basically a rich man after his first novel, Black Sunday (1975), sold for a $300,000 advance that he split with two friends who’d helped him research it. After that he told a reporter that he was quitting journalism and deadlines altogether. Working henceforth at his own pace.

Harris’s first novel is about a terrorist plot to blow up the Super Bowl. It was a big hit and quickly adapted into a movie which was shot down here at the Miami Orange Bowl during Super Bowl X. My grandpa was a police officer at the time and you can see him standing at-attention in the background.

One night as a cop he saw a car driving wonky so he turned on his strobe lights. The car pulled over and he followed it to the shoulder of the road and soon as it shifted into PARK all four passengers rolled their windows down and tossed machineguns out onto the pavement. They said they were surrendering. He asked em what for.

I know he told me what it is they’d done but I never seem to remember that part because what’s fun about the story is how scary it can be not to look at a McGuffin and not know the story around it.

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4.

His dad was a Miami police officer too. Then he became a lawyer and made some money and bought a big house in Little Havana. The only one¹. Guys pulled up with guns one morning and mugged him in the driveway. They said, “Give us the rings on your fingers,” and so he gave them. They said, “Give us the bracelet on your wrist,” and he argued. I think there was something sentimental about that bracelet. Another detail someone told me at some point but I forgot it.

When he was done shooting off curses and slurs they still had all their bullets and so he took off the bracelet and they left.

After that my great-grandad limped around his property on a cane or a walker with two pistols and knife on his person at all times. One of the pistols was on his ankle which he struggled to reach because diabetes. He ate ginger snaps by the bag and everyone warned him what might happen if he kept on with the sweets until one day he said to his illness, “Listen,” too old to argue anymore, “take the toe; leave the cookies.”

He was in his 70s when the Elian Gonzalez scandal² was going on just a couple blocks away and he could hear the protests and the news vans from his kitchen. There was a 50-foot flag pole on his front lawn and it flew a US flag you could dress a bed with. Someone crept onto the lawn one night during the Elian protests and stole the flag. Grandad lived another ten years and his memory wasn’t great but periodically conversation would amble back to that night, when his flag got stolen, and how he wished he hadn’t gone to bed so early cuz otherwise he could have shot them.

The first photo I ever saw of a naked woman was a gigantic poster in his home office. A Playboy foldout. I asked who it was and he said, “That’s a swimsuit girlie!” and I asked him where the swimsuit was and he said yep!

Reason I bring it up: my favorite part so far in this Raftery book is he quotes someone saying — of Thomas Harris’s painstaking approach to writing — that “every sentence,” for Harris, “is a jewel, every paragraph a bracelet.”

Wanna get out my Oija board and tell that one to Grandad. Hear him say no one ever put a fuckin gun in his face to steal a paragraph.

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PS

Be sure to check out my Bret Easton Ellis profile (or “nonfiction novella,” a John Pistelli-coinage for which I’m deeply grateful) over at The Metropolitan Review. Vinny Reads was kind about it in his post this week:

In truth, I have not finished it. Not because it is long (though it is), but because I am savoring my way through it. I devoured the Vollmann and Moore pieces in one sitting each, so I’m taking my time with this one. Alex is one of the best of us, and I will add my name to growing list of folks that believe he will leave all of us in the Substack ghetto behind in due time.

Seduces me further with a shoutout regarding my novel Cubafruit, for which Vinny wrote the very first Substack review — but not the latest! Cubafruit is now a finalist for the Samuel Richardson Prize, and you can read what the two nominating judges said about the book here and here.

1. I lived in the same Little Havana apartment from 2018-2022 and maybe it’s a kid memory — life as a child, as Fran Lebowitz puts it, is “a world of knees” — but I remember that two story house being gigantic and never in my four years in Little Havana did I see another one like it; i.e., like the house I remember as a kid.

2. Elian Gonzalez was six years old when his mom brought him from Cuba to Miami in a dangerous boat ride. His mother and eleven other people died at sea and Elian was rescued by fishermen. He was treated at a hospital and released into the custody of his extended family. The only title I’m seeing in a quick Google search is that one was a “great uncle.” An international custody battle ensued, between his uncle and his father back in Cuba. His father won the case and now Elian is a popular political figure in Cuba’s Communist Party.