[alansplace]

The Dresden Files started life as a class project in my Writing a Genre Fiction Novel class. In point of fact, it was my attempt to prove to my writing teacher how wrong she was about all this structured, story-craft nonsense she was trying to teach me about. You see, I knew about these things because I had a bachelor’s degree in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing–whereas she merely had a master’s in journalism (and had published forty novels). So to prove her wrong, I set out to do absolutely everything she said exactly the way she said it–to be her good little writing monkey and show her exactly what horrible things resulted from such a restrictive, cookie-cutter approach to writing would create

And I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

Which showed her. Hah.
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Overall, the series gets better or at least it gets different. Storm Front is by far the closest book to the series' pulp noir roots. It's a very dark book; Dresden's an antisocial asshole; there's a lot of chauvinism in the narrative. All of these things fade (though don't entirely disappear) as the series goes on.

The plot is very noir too and the fantasy elements are limited in the first book. Storm Front deals with the real world almost exclusively. You get glimpses of the supernatural world (the Council, the Red Court, etc) but for the most part it deals with human beings doing human things for human reasons. Fool Moon is similar, dealing mostly with the real world, but it does feature pockets of supernatural society with the werewolves. Grave Peril, the third book, delves deeply into the fantasy world dealing extensively with the Red Court and even going into the Never-Never for the first time. The subsequent books follow Grave Peril's lead.

Storm Front and Fool Moon also feel like "Monster-of-the-Week" books because of this. The thru-plot of the series starts in Grave Peril because the thru-plot deals with the supernatural world.

But anyway, I'd say the part of Storm Front most representative of the rest of the series is probably the scorpion scene. The Dresden Files is a lot of a guy doing his best to do the right thing and things constantly getting worse for him. It's a lot like Indiana Jones in that way.

Dresden Files changes from Philip Marlowe with magic to Indiana Jones with magic starting with Grave Peril, best book is Dead Beat.