Storm Front

Storm Front

Chicago-based wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden is called upon to help a woman locate her magic-using husband. Not long thereafter, a mob enforcer and his consort end up dead, and the police are looking to Harry for answers. As if that isn’t enough, the magic world’s rule-keepers are convinced that he is up to no good and are determined to bring him to justice.

The first book in Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files series, Storm Front lets us into Dresden’s world and gives us shades of his backstory while still maintaining an aura of mystery about him. That may be a reason to read the follow-ups because the writing here certainly is not.

Though intended, undoubtedly, as an homage to classic noir, Storm Front parrots the worst of the genres clichés. Dresden himself is the archetypical brooding, sarcastic, down-on-his luck antihero. The magical elements do add a sense of novelty to his character, but he comes across far too often as a third-rate Philip Marlowe ripoff with a pentagram and a staff. Unfortunately, his supporting cast is no better. His tough-but-fair-minded police contact, Karrin Murphy, is basically Marlowe’s Bernie Ohls in a skirt, and the sympathetic bartender, the smooth Mafioso, the skeptical cop, the client withholding information, and the (in this case, literal) hard-bitten vamp are all stock characters we’ve seen before.

Alas, the familiarity extends to the plotting as well. As per genre conventions, the people Dresden talks to for information have a way of ending up dead shortly thereafter, to the surprise of absolutely no one. Also, one would have to be an idiot (or Dresden himself for half of the book) to not wonder if the wizard’s two cases are in some way related. To top it all off, there’s even an “all’s well that ends well” wrap-up at the end.

Two things save this book from being a total bust. One, the oddity of the magic/mystery mashup lends itself to some amusement. There’s Bob, the horny ghost that Dresden keeps in a skull, and there’s a fairy that randomly craves pizza. Secondly, Butcher has a decent eye for detail and renders Chicago’s cityscape in appropriately dreary hues.

Given that Butcher wrote Storm Front at age 25, there is reason to believe that his work has gained polish and complexity in the years since (he’s now 40). But if Storm Front is indeed a harbinger of things to come, then the much-ballyhooed series seems like less than a magical reading experience.

6.75/10