Storm Front - The Dresden Files (Book 1)

I walked out of Broken City (Allen Hughes, 2013) earlier this year with a sense of awe for just how well it paid homage to the film-noir genre, and with a clear vision that, “Wouldn’t it be great to mix fantasy and hard-boiled?” “No need,” a friend suggested, “Haven't you read the Dresden Files?” I took the opportunity to take him up on that last week and I must say, I was pretty impressed.

The Dresden Files is a series of fantasy/P.I. novels written by Jim Butcher (which is a great pseudonym if not his name). It was first published in 2000, with a short-run television series in 2007, so you can see I am a little late to the party here. The first book in the series, Storm Front, sees its protagonist, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden tackling a particularly tricky (and grisly) murder. 

The setting is like a modern-day Raymond Chandler: a lone-wolf P.I. working from his tiny office, a month behind on rent and living hand-to-mouth. The twist is, of course, that Dresden is a wizard. It hits all of the hardboiled keys: Dresden is a self-proclaimed loner, living in modern-day Chicago, but he alone “has seen it's true face” (in the words of Rorschach's Journal, Watchmen). As a private investigator (or wizard for hire) he has the tenacity of a lock-jawed guard dog, refusing to let go of a case even after he is dismissed from it, putting everything on the line so that, in one memorable scene, he is even picked up by the police naked on the street in a thunderstorm, battered, bleeding and bruised. And most of all, he has an unquestionable moral code that tends to get him into trouble. Butcher takes the archetypal characters from a genre defined by stories like The Big Sleep — the damsel, the reporter, the femme fatale (in Butcher's case, a literal vampire), the noble gang boss, the reclusive barman — and plants them firmly into his own world, which has a sense of familiar surrealism more reminiscent of Gaiman than Miéville.

I can see why it only made
it to one season.

The mix of wizard and P.I. is a match made in, well, a gritty alter-Chicago. Both are fringe-dwellers, with knowledge and abilities which the police don’t — or are unwilling — to use. The book has its own magical equivalent of “turn in your badge”, giving Dresden a literal deadline to solve both of his cases. Storm Front keeps its reader just-barely informed about its main character, leaving tantalising clues to his broken past but not giving us time to focus overly on them. The plot moves forward in convenient leaps of logic, intuition and (most of all) lucky breaks. In an era of high-fantasy wizards dominated by Rowling, Sanderson, Feist and Rothfuss, it is a refreshingly 'average' take on wizardry.

The book falls down a little with its mystery, leaving some aspects of Dresden unanswered (like what happened with the people in his past he killed — his old master and his old girlfriend?) I can’t decide if Butcher plans on filling us in in future books, or if Dresden himself can’t find the words. The writing is very good, though not as compelling as some other books circulating at the moment. It takes position as a good start to a pulp series, with a much-needed twist on both the wizardry and the P.I. genres, though nothing to particularly write home about.

I am greatly looking forward to the other 14 however, with the latest set to come out in January 2014. I will be interested to see what happens when Butcher exhausts the hardboiled references and fleshes out his own world more. 

The Ups: The book revels in its grittiness; creates a grand vision for its reader and leaves other parts for us to fill in; it is an original idea that untames the recently romance-strewn genre of urban fantasy.

The Downs: Keeping so close to its hardboiled roots leaves it feeling more like an homage than a book in its own right, hopefully this is just due to its position as series starter.

Verdict: 3.5 cowboy-boot-wearing pentacles out of 5

Definitely worth reading if you are after a more adult pulp series on the way home from work.