It's not every day you read a novel which contains the sentence "I was stuck in a frozen elevator, handcuffed to my unconscious friend who was dying of poison while a magical scorpion the size of some French cars tried to tear its way into me and rip me apart." Then again, Jim Butcher's Storm Front is certainly not your everyday novel.
This is the first of the Dresden Files series, which I'd heard about vaguely from a number of places before finally taking the plunge on. What is the Dresden Files? Well, it's a cross between hardboiled noir detective fiction and urban fantasy, with a healthy seasoning of comedy on top. It's crime fiction, but not exactly the crime fiction you might expect.
Harry Dresden, the title character, is a "consulting wizard" in Chicago, the only consulting wizard in the country, it seems. He has a contract of sorts with the Chicago Police Department, where he helps them solve crimes which involve the paranormal, as well as conducting his own investigations from his (typically hardboiled) rundown office where he's chronically behind on the rent.
So, the big elephant in the room, yes there is magic and wizardry involved in this series. This isn't your standard fantasy-novel kind of magic, by any means, though. The potions which Dresden concocts at one point are full of relatively "normal" ingredients, but are described as both smelling and tasting horrible, as well as having slightly unpredictable effects. The murders which start this investigation off, too, are uncompromisingly brutal and a lot is made of how difficult they would be for a wizard to perform. In other words, we don't have the easy cop-out answer of "Well, it was magic" for how a crime was committed - this is well-worked-out magic with rules which can't be broken.
Just as this isn't the standard kind of fantasy novel, neither is it your standard-issue hardboiled gumshoe story. Yes, there are several female characters of debatable morals, cops who wonder whether Dresden is really on their side and some physical violence, but Dresden is not exactly Sam Spade in his view of the world.
As a crime novel, though, this works surprisingly well. It takes the relatively standard plot device of having the detective ("wizard", in this instance) investigating two crimes that may or may not be linked and overlays its magical backdrop onto it. A war between an organised crime figure - who is still Italian-American, a stereotype I'm not sure we'll ever see the end of - and a ring of drug suppliers becomes much more interesting when the drug may have occult powers, not to mention when the detective can have the "showdown" scene with the crime boss by causing a jukebox to melt.
In typical noir fashion, the plot is slightly convoluted, and the revelation of what was really going on comes to Dresden while he's under a direct threat of death himself. A lot of the plot development happens in this way, in fact, which is a good thing in this style of novel.
The dark comedy of the better hardboiled novelists is also present, and in fact sometimes turns into full-blown slapstick or near equivalents thereof. A key witness (a faery) is trapped by magical means and gets just as irritated by that as an entrapped witness in Raymond Chandler would, for example. On a much more impressive note is a scene involving a naked Dresden being attacked on a date by a demon...while his date has accidentally taken a love potion and has something other than escape on her mind. Some things just make more sense when you read them, perhaps.
Even the belief that those with magical powers can cause problems for electronic devices makes an appearance here. Dresden runs into constant problems with phones and the lift in his building, for example, and is also unable to be X-rayed towards the end.
While Storm Front was Butcher's debut novel, the series now extends to 15 entries plus a collection of short stories. It's clear that there was always a plan to do so, as frequent mentions are made of Dresden's background - most notably, he used his powers to kill someone and has thus broken one of the Laws of Magic, resulting in the powerful White Council watching him carefully and even suspecting him of complicity in the crimes throughout this novel.
As in many first novels, Dresden's not an entirely three-dimensional character, but he is given enough of a personality and a background to make the reader very curious about what he might get up to next.
There are plenty of novels and series out there playing on the "shadow war" concept - people with magical or esoteric knowledge who are trying to prevent unspeakable evil from taking over the world. Indeed, even a certain worldwide best-seller series about a particular boy wizard occasionally takes on this theme. With Storm Front, Butcher has demonstrated that there is another way of taking such a plot and finding more life in it.
Highly recommended. 4 stars.
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