My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call.
Twenty-five years ago, Storm Front, the first book in the Dresden Files series of urban fantasy novels, was published. It was April of 2000. America was getting ready to decide whether George W. Bush or Al Gore would be the next President. The Y2K bug had failed to destroy the world. The dot-com bubble was bubbling, the Twin Towers were still standing, Johnny Cash was still alive and making some of the best music of his career, and George Lucas was in the midst of releasing his trilogy of Star Wars prequel movies.
It was a different world. I have to stop and stare blankly into space for a moment when I realize that none of my current students had even been born when the great Jim Butcher adapted a story that he had titled “Semiautomagic” into his debut novel. The genre of urban fantasy – stories with fantastic elements set in our modern world – had certainly already existed, growing in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s with such offerings as Terri Windling’s Borderland stories, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, and the Shadowrun roleplaying game. But with the Dresden Files, Jim Butcher established himself as The Big Dog of the genre.
In the Dresden Files, the main character, Harry Dresden, is a hardboiled private investigator working the mean streets of Chicago. Harry is also a wizard, and the novels are meant to have one foot firmly planted in the world of detective noir (or hardboiled mystery, if you want to get into that argument) and the other foot in fantasy. A legbreaker sent by a crime lord to rough up our gumshoe hero is a ghoul. The femme fatale is a vampire. An informant who provides a crucial clue is a diminuitive fairy. And the sinister plot that threatens to overwhelm the main character will probably involve some sort of dark sorcery. If by some chance you have not yet read these novels, get to it. The Dresden Files is also a major influence on my own urban fantasy series, so if you like Butcher’s work, maybe give Chosen by the Sword a try.
Storm Front opens by showing Harry’s detective side. We see him in his office, facing a crippling lack of clients and a stack of overdue bills (and he gets no respect from the mailman who delivers them). But already, beginning with the opening paragraph, we are given hints that Harry is a keen observer who picks up on the details around him: a crucial quality for a detective. A phone call from a nervous potential client, and then a call from the police, drops Harry in the middle of a pair of mysteries. The client’s husband has disappeared, and two people have been murdered – seemingly by magic – in a hotel room.
Reading this book after a quarter century of conjuring by Harry’s name shows two things. First, it stood out to me how much has changed over the series. The Harry Dresden we meet here is still at the beginning of his career (Jim Butcher has said that Harry is 25 in Storm Front). He has never met a vampire. He doesn’t know about fairies and pizza yet. He’s not very good at threatening people. Butcher’s presentation of Harry’s personality leans a lot more on “sarcastic gumshoe” and less on “overgrown D&D nerd” in this debut book. Harry’s relationship with Karrin Murphy is downright antagonistic. The earlier stories in the series are also a lot more strongly reliant on hardboiled detective tropes, whereas the Harry Dresden of Battle Ground is more of a fantasy adventure superhero who is too busy wielding legendary superweapons to save the world from an invasion of otherworldly gods and monsters to be asked to handle things like a missing persons case.
That being said, there remain powerful continuities. Jim Butcher shows his ability to plan ahead as a writer and plant seeds, introducing concepts and characters that will play central roles in later books. Harry’s basic character is also instantly recognizable. Despite what I said about some differences, Harry’s honesty, his ability to size up a situation and find creative solutions, his basic decency and idealism in the face of a cruel world, his cluelessness when it comes to women, his problem with authority, and his sense of humor are already in place in the first book of the series.
I will close this out with something that stood out to me as a social psychologist. I was also 25 years old when Storm Front was published, and so certain deeper connections to the surrounding culture had eluded me. In the first chapter, Harry tells the reader about recent developments in the world of the supernatural: The end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium had seen something of a renaissance in the public awareness of the paranormal. Psychics, haunts, vampires – you name it. People still didn’t take them seriously, but all the things Science had promised us hadn’t come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn’t changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.
Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children. People were looking for something – I just think they didn’t know what. (pp 3-4)
Sociologists, historians, philosophers, and psychologists describe our current period in history as a disenchanted time. As Charles Taylor describes in A Secular Age, the West spent the past few centuries shifting from a view of the world in which the line between nature and supernature is porous, to one in which the natural world is strongly buffered against any impingement of supernatural factors (e.g., the deists’ idea of God as having wound up the universe like a clock and then having just stepped back to watch the gears turn), and the human self is similarly strongly buffered. I certainly do not have the time or space here to go into all the ins and outs of Taylor’s argument (I was in a book group that read A Secular Age, and it took a room full of professors two years to talk through it), but one side-effect of this historical process was that our ideas about meaning went from seeing the entire universe as charged with meaning to seeing meaning as something that we have to find inside ourselves. The problem with that is that it has not worked. When the meaning of my life is nothing more than whatever I feel like it is, meaning becomes flimsy and weak. Psychologically, mere authenticity is not a load-bearing structure. The great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called it the “existential vacuum”: a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness that he saw as the biggest source of emotional turmoil of the past hundred years. Rising rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide point to the truth of Frankl’s diagnosis. I work with some of these ideas in my own scholarship, arguing that psychologists themselves can be caught in the unspoken assumption that there is nothing more to life than one’s own subjective gratification, potentially doing more harm than good with some of their clients.
The human heart rebels against the idea that life is just a pointless movement of chemicals. And so even those who have turned their backs on traditional ideas about spirituality scramble to find re-enchantment somewhere. Anywhere. People seek a meaning-charged existence through politics, consumerism, arguing on the internet… anything to convince ourselves that we are valuable members of a meaningful universe. Whether he was intentionally tapping into the existential vacuum or not, Jim Butcher employs the emptiness of disenchantment as an explanation for why people in the early twenty-first century might be more open to the idea of magic in a world that has banished and ridiculed magic.
Whether or not you are on board with my Charles Taylor connection, fans are in general agreement that Storm Front still holds up as an urban fantasy mystery adventure. Twenty-five years and seventeen books later, the Dresden Files remains THE urban fantasy series.
Thoughts? Agreements? Disagreements? Let me know in the comments below.