Putting Up a Good Front

Do you know Harry Dresden? It seems like almost everyone I know does. A lot of people in my circle of friends are fans of author Jim Butcher's mystery/fantasy series, The Dresden Files. Over the years, I've heard them gushing with each other over the new books, and I'd tucked it in the back of my mind as something to get around to reading. I felt like my friends were never really giving me the hard sell, so I'd never exactly made it a top priority.

In any event, it finally did bubble up to the top of my reading stack, and I read the first book of the series, Storm Front. It wasn't quite what I expected, but thinking about it, it's probably exactly what I should have expected.

I expected the book to be somewhat more "fantasy" than it was. I know that's sort of an odd thing to say when basically every chapter includes magic of some kind, and almost every page reminds you that Harry Dresden is a wizard. But more than all that, the book is a private detective novel set in Chicago, with all the hard-boiled, film noir stylings that entails. Butcher's bucking of convention (and it is significant) is to add the magic elements to that; having done that, he's going to check every box on the list of classic detective fiction tropes.

One of those conventions, in my view, is that no character is remotely as interesting as the detective himself. And while I'll certainly take an interesting main character over not, the lack of compelling side characters did stand out a bit in a book that paints a world (magic in underbelly Chicago) so vividly. I'm sure that if I do go on and read the 15-or-so existing Dresden Files books, characters will recur and develop. But right now, as of one book, it feels like maybe only two characters besides Dresden are built to last -- and one of those is a spirit living inside a skull that gets little more than a chapter.

But I also acknowledge that few authors of long-running series nail everything perfectly right out of the gate. Indeed, it seems like the writers with the best "book ones" go on to struggle in writing later volumes -- think George R.R. Martin, Scott Lynch, or Patrick Rothfuss. The question is whether I see in Storm Front the seeds of what could become as great as my friends seem to think it is, and the answer to that is yes, I think so. This book alone doesn't have me raving, but the world building the main character are intriguing enough. The writing style is pretty fun too: fantasy conceits of the sort you usually find in a long-winded door stop epic, dropped into a blunt and direct page turner.

I'm going to cycle around to some other reading first, but I've already made plans to come back to book two of this series and work my way forward. If the writing at least stays at the current level, I imagine I will make it to the "book four or five" that people tell me is when things really start getting great. Storm Front itself, I give a B.