Delacorte Expects Huge Appetite for ‘Lambs’ Sequel

Last year, a decade after publication of “The Silence of the Lambs,” publisher Carole Baron started to get the feeling that she would receive the sequel to the scary classic sooner rather than later. Its author, Thomas Harris, and his agent, Morton L. Janklow, a few times conveyed what she called “a notion of coming to conclusion. But I wasn’t sure exactly when I would get the manuscript.

“If it came earlier this year, we would have it out in time for summer,” she said. “If it came later, we’d have it for Christmas. But I always knew that only a short period of time would pass before publication because the book would be desirable to so many.”

The manuscript finally arrived March 23. Delacorte Press will put the book on sale Tuesday. It’s called “Hannibal.”

Finally, readers will learn what has become of Dr. Hannibal Lecter--the brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer whose legend was etched so deeply in the popular imagination by the earlier book and by Anthony Hopkins’ icy portrayal in the film version.

The first printing will exceed 1 million copies--a splash so big that a few other publishers have rescheduled books so they will not be lost in stores amid the expected waves of interest.

To ensure such a quick turnaround from finished manuscript to bookstore sale, Delacorte did not pause in its breakneck production schedule to print galley copies for reviewers, so that few individuals outside the company have read the book.

But is it creepy?

“Ahhhh,” Baron said, a vibrato of fear in her reply. “It’s fascinating.”

Variety has reported that the new story, which resumes several years after Lecter’s escape from prison in “Silence,” involves a man once maimed grotesquely by the doctor. He has hatched an especially gruesome payback scheme and FBI agent Clarice Starling (the Jodie Foster character in the movie) tracks down Lecter to warn him about it.

It will be left for Baron and others to sell “Hannibal,” for the 59-year-old Harris, though a former reporter for the Associated Press and newspapers in the South, is sticking to his position of more than 20 years and doing no interviews. Calls to his summer home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., were not answered. In a polite exchange with a Miami Herald reporter who showed up at his Miami Beach home six years ago, Harris explained: “I’d love to make an exception and grant an interview, but I never have. I put a very high value on my privacy, and Miami has been very good about respecting that.”

A writer for New York magazine who managed to reach Harris when “Silence of the Lambs” was packing theaters in 1991, heard him praise it as “a great movie” before he concluded the conversation: “So I just work and I try to put things in my books that I want to say. And really that’s about the size of it.”

The size of his advance for “Hannibal” and a book to follow was $5.2 million. That’s less of a deal by today’s standards, when leading entertainers and newsmakers, such as Tim Allen and Colin Powell, have received as much upfront for only one book and numerous bestselling novelists have earned as much or more as Harris is getting on a per-book basis.

However, it’s a measure of just how deliciously scary “The Silence of the Lambs” was that Baron, the publisher of Dell (of which Delacorte is a part), agreed to pay the $5.2 million, including $1 million on signing, long before the book’s extraordinary commercial impact was felt. The figure was reached in an auction that Janklow conducted in November 1988, a few months after St. Martin’s Press had published “Silence” in hardcover.

Though a bestseller, the book had not risen to the top of the New York Times’ bestseller list, recalled Thomas J. McCormack, the retired chairman and editorial director of St. Martin’s who had paid Harris $750,000 for the novel and edited it. “At the time of the auction, it seemed to me that I was being so canny and shrewd,” McCormack said last week. “The earnings on ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ which had sold about 105,000 copies in hardcover, were therefore far under the level that Dell was prepared to spend, especially when it was offering a million dollars on signing.”

Another concern for McCormack was that Harris, who had spent six years on his previous novel (“Red Dragon”) and seven years on “Silence,” would pass another seven years writing his next book and thereby drive up the true cost of the signing bonus.

“Then came the movie,” McCormack said, “and it made a fool of all my canny ratiocinations.”

To say the least. After McCormack lost Harris to Dell, St. Martin’s paperback edition of “Silence” was published in 1989 and sold 1.5 million copies. The 1991 movie--which went on to sweep the Oscars for best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay--helped sell an additional 3.5 million paperback copies.

“If I could have foreseen all that, I would have hung in on that auction,” McCormack added. “Hannibal Lecter really became a kind of household figure and the result of that will carry on to this new book and make people pick it up in the first place. I’m sure it’s going to do marvelously.”

After Baron prevailed in the auction, she told Newsday: “You’re playing the futures. It’s very difficult to be precise about factors that go into your offer. . . . After a certain point, you’re just going for a writer and you don’t really care how much you have to pay.”

Last week, she was amused to hear her words of 11 years ago read back to her: “That is the way I felt. I went for the writer. I didn’t know what he was going to write. I don’t think he did.”

Baron’s belief in Harris’ talent, and her friendship with the writer since years before the auction, perhaps made it inevitable that he would be displeased by an unexpected development last week. On Thursday, Random House Inc., Dell’s parent corporation, announced a reorganization and revealed that Baron plans to leave the company on June 30. That’s the day before the reorganization goes into effect, folding Dell into a larger group with Bantam Books that will be headed by another executive.

Harris released a statement through Janklow: “Relieving Carole Baron as president and publisher of Dell in order to follow some mechanical blueprint of corporate structure is a mindless waste of the company’s best resources.”

Meanwhile, the film rights to “Hannibal” have been bought for a record $9 million by producer Dino DeLaurentiis. Hopkins is said to like the idea of returning as Lecter. Foster, who’s in Asia making a movie, also received a copy of the new book and has yet to signal her intentions.

Bring on the summer chills.

Paul D. Colford’s e-mail address is Paul.colford@newsday.com.