Storm Front

Storm Front
Jim Butcher
April 2000
Roc Publishing

You remember a few months back I posted about Black Magic Woman, how I really wanted to like it because my friends loved it, blah, blah.

Yeah…seems this keeps happening to me.

I’m a huge fan of the film noir/pulp detective story. I’ve read Chandler and Hammett; I’ve seen every film noir known to man. I’ve listened to every episode of both Philip Marlowe, (not as good as the original), and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, not to mention a few other notable radio shows. I love the genre a lot, and it is clear that Jim Butcher loves it a lot too. His first outing with his wizard detective, Harry Dresden, is a more modern, and slightly altered retelling of those same sort of dark, blood drenched detective stories from our grandparents era, where the detective always gets drug into a seemingly innocuous case, only to end up being beaten up, threatened, nearly killed, and getting involved with the way wrong dame.

Dresden is a wizard. We don’t know how he figured this out or when he started practicing, but we do gather that there is an art to it, and that there are other wizards who more or less follow a code of conduct run by the mysterious White Council. We don’t know much about any other wizards, save for Morgan, a particularly pissy one who has it out for Harry. Seems back in the day Harry had a run in with dark magic and someone dying, but we don’t know any of the details of that either, only that the White Council was divided in what to do about it, so they split down the middle and decided to put a doom on him. Mess up again and we will have pissy Morgan kill you.

I suppose this tends to put a cramp in anyone’s style.

So Harry spends his days trying to keep a low profile, which is a bit difficult to do when he advertises himself as a “wizard” for hire. Apparently business as a paranormal expert isn’t so great, because he also does a gig working with a special unit of the Chicago police department that specializes in his type of thing…strange and paranormal, think X-files without the hotness of Mulder. Oh wait….

Anyway, as luck would have it, Harry gets jobs from both of his gigs in the same day, which is a boon this his bank account. One is a woman who is searching for the husband she suspects has vanished on her. She insists he hasn’t left her, but nervously pays Harry a large amount of cash to track down his whereabouts. Karrin Murphy of the CPD also calls him in on a case on the mysterious and gruesome death of a prostitute and her john, a man who happens to work for the largest criminal syndicate in town. The death screams it was done by vicious magical means, and of course all eyes turn to Harry, the guy who advertises himself as the wizard. And it isn’t just the police that are giving him the stink eye; it is Morgan and the White Council as well.

Now Harry is under pressure to figure out not just how the murders were committed, but by whom and for what purpose. His search sticks him in the middle of a turf war between criminal groups surrounding a strange new drug called “Third Eye”, the deaths of those who attempt to aid Harry in his search, and a really bad first date with a woman that Harry’s been attracted to for a while.

Not to mention an embarrassing incident with him running around naked with soap in his eyes.

For a first run for Harry Dresden, Storm Front is not a bad book. The action is tight, the plot makes sense, and it has the sort of gripping violence that makes a nice, old fashioned, pulpy ‘who-dun-it’. If you take the supernatural factor out of the story, it’s an OK crime story, of a guy who is over his head trying to figure out what in the Sam-hell is going on around him.

That being said, it is still an urban fantasy, involving a wizard, and magic, and supernatural aspects that are brought up, but then never really delved into. And I think that is where the book started failing for me pretty quickly. I admit it’s my own personal quirk that I love to know stupid details like why wizards exist, how they operate, what is the role of the supernatural in terms of the rest of the world. Perhaps it’s the years I spent playing Vampire: The Masquerade, I couldn’t tell you. From almost the start that niggling lack of detail about Harry’s world sort of bothered me. Admittedly, many pulp-murder stories have this same lack of detail, but none of them deal with wizards or any other strange supernaturals.

And it’s not to say that there wasn’t that background feeling there. As the story goes along, Harry reveals more and more aspects of what he does and how he does it, but it’s brought up in such an afterthought manner I sort of had to ask myself how much of this did Butcher really think out before he wrote this first novel.

One of my friends is finishing the latest novel, Turn Coat, and made a very astute statement about Butcher’s writing. It’s not a bad thing, but really his writing style is very much “guy”. It’s hard to explain, and I don’t think any author goes out there thinking they will write “guy” style or “girl” style, but there’s something about it that seems to really work on that male, testosterone level that I think is what carries a good portion of the book. And it makes it hard for me to sometimes really delve into it. At times you want to really like Harry, but he is a particularly standoffish character at first, and I’m hoping with time and further adventures this changes.

On the flip side, I don’t hate this novel. After all several of my dearest friends love it, and they can’t all be wrong. As Harry Dresden’s story is part of a series, I’m hoping that much of what I was seeking in Storm Front begins to resolve itself in the later books, to the point that I have a feeling I really will love this series when it’s all said and done. Just right now, I was sort of ‘eh’ about the first one.

I feel bad giving this a not-so-hot review, especially after I went and got this copy signed by the guy. I feel even worse one of my good college friends is being published by Roc as well and loves Jim Butcher, stalks him, etc. And I tend to trust this person's instincts in books, (especially as hers are awesome and I’ll spam those all over the interwebz closer to the publishing date.) Like I said, I want to think it’s just the rookie attempt that didn’t give me the wow factor, and that this will change with other Dresden File books.

Rate this wormy book: I give this a FAT worm. It is an enjoyable enough book for a sunny afternoon if you sit through and get it read. Not to deep in the supernatural as far as urban fantasy goes, but very good with the sort of noir-style mystery, with familiar themes and the sort of usual storyline you find in one of these stories. Why that might sound familiar and bland to most, it actually is done fairly well, and the supernatural factor does give it a sort of twist that makes it far from predictable. Just don’t expect too much explanation from the start as to how and why Harry’s world works.