Meanwhile we have discovered how Hannibal acquired his celebrated "memory palace" (a kindly Jewish tutor called Jakov, back at the ancestral seat), and there is an odd subplot of art-historical detection. A mathematical and scientific prodigy in his teens, he goes to medical school, and sets about tracking down the men who wronged him. After the war, he is found by his uncle, and taken to live in Paris. Hannibal's parents and the staff are killed, and something monstrous happens to his little sister.
The gothic Lithuanian castle that is home to Count Lecter and his family, including little Hannibal, is caught up in the fighting between Germany and the USSR in the 1940s. Spelling it all out in a prequel, however, does risk bathos. Or don't do it at all, as Bram Stoker did not with Dracula (but Francis Ford Coppola felt obliged to do in his otherwise rather faithful adaptation).
If you have to explain a villain, it is perhaps best to do it on the hoof, in evocative flashback, as with Keyser Soze's origin story in The Usual Suspects. It was that fascination, felt by FBI agent Clarice Starling (along with the reader) in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, that fuelled those novels. There is danger here, as there is not in the case of superheroes and iconic spies, for if a character such as Lecter is explained as himself a victim of some original trauma, he is no longer fascinating as an avatar of absolute evil. Hannibal Rising promises to explain how a human being became Dr Lecter. Perhaps oppressed by imagery of a teeth-sucking Anthony Hopkins in Ridley Scott's squelchily horrible film of Hannibal - how do you top that climactic meal? - Thomas Harris, too, goes back to a clean slate, to beginnings. Reimagining the origin myth is a fine way to revive an ailing franchise, as Batman Begins and Casino Royale have shown.
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