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(A Divine Ie)1

FOREWORD TO A FATAL INTERVIEW

I want to tell you the circumstances in which I first encountered Hannibal Lecter, MD

In the fall of 1979, owing to an illness in my family, I returned hohteen e of Rich kindly gave un house in the center of a vast cotton field, and there I worked, often at night

To write a novel, you begin hat you can see and then you add what cae of Rich, Mississippi, working under difficult circuator Will Graham in the home of the victi the dead family’s ho the crimes I pushed to find out, to see what cah the home, the crime scene, in the dark with Will and could see no more and no less than he could see

Sohts on in my little house and walk across the flat fields When I looked back from a distance, the house looked like a boat at sea, and all around ht

I soon becas who roamed free across the fields in as ements with the fae for theround frozen and dry, I started giving theh fifty pounds of dog food a week They followed me around, and they were a lot o

f co rough dogs you could not touch They walked with ht and when I couldn’t see the along in the dark When I orking in the cabin, they waited on the front porch, and when the

Standing baffled in the vast fields outsideall around me, my vision still clouded with the desk lamp, I tried to see what had happened at the cris, intilohen a retina not hu had happened Youa novel you are notup It’s all there and you just have to find it

Will Graham had to ask somebody, he needed so before he let hied in a previous case I kneas terribly reluctant to consult the best source he had At the ti painful ’s work I felt for Graham

So it ith some trepidation that I accompanied him to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criet down to business, we encountered the kind of fool you know fro your own daily business, Dr Frederick Chilton, who delayed us for two or three interminable days

I found that I could leave Chilton in the cabin with the lights on and look back at his I was invisible then, out there in the dark, the way I am invisible to my characters when I’ their fates with little or no help from me

Finished with the tedious Chilton at last, Graham and I went on to the Violent Ward and the steel door slammed shut behind us with a terrific noise

Will Graha Dr Lecter’s cell Grahaht Dr Lecter was asleep and I ju his eyes

I was enjoying , my invisibility to Chilton and Graham and the staff, but I was not comfortable in the presence of Dr Lecter, not sure at all that the doctor could not see me

Like Graham, I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr Lecter uncohts when they X-ray your head Graham’s intervieith Dr Lecter went quickly, in real ti it, in and over whatever surface was uppermost on my table I orn out when it was over—the incidental clashes and howls of an asylu on in my head, and on the front porch of , seated with their eyes closed, faces upturned to the full le vowel between O and U, a few just hu

I had to revisit Graham’s intervieith Dr Lecter a hundred tiet rid of the superfluous static, the jail noises, the screa of the damned that had made some of the words hard to hear

I still didn’t knoas co the crimes, but I knew for the first time that ould find out, and that ould arrive at hiically, expensive to others in the book And so it turned out

Years later when I started The Silence of the Lambs, I did not know that Dr Lecter would return I had always liked the character of Dahlia Iyad in Black Sunday and wanted to do a novel with a strong wo and, not two pages into the new novel, I found she had to go visit the doctor I ad enors of jealousy at the ease hich Dr Lecter saw into her, when it was so difficult for me

By the time I undertook to record the events in Hannibal , the doctor, to my surprise, had taken on a life of his own You see as I did

I dreaded doing Hannibal, dreaded the personal wear and tear, dreaded the choices I would have to watch, feared for Starling In the end I let theo, let Dr Lecter and Clarice Starling decide events according to their natures There is a certain amount of courtesy involved

As a sultan once said: I do not keep falcons—they live with me

When in the winter of 1979 I entered the Baltireat metal door crashed closed behind me, little did I knoaited at the end of the corridor; how seldonize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home

TH Miami, January 2000