Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:00)
So I've been reading these noir books set in the 1830s, right? And one thing that stood out to me, a new character walks in and if the author wants you to be suspicious of this character, add and he wasn't wearing a hat because only respectable people wear hats in the 1930s, right? And I feel like we're getting a raw deal because all the other things from the 1930s are coming back. We've got

Baloreilly (00:15)
Right. Right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:24)
robber barons, recessions, saber rattling, but this time we don't get to wear hats. I wanna be able to pull off a cool hat like Dick Tracy or Indiana Jones, but I know people are just gonna laugh at me in today's day and age.

Baloreilly (00:34)
You know,

I wear a collared shirt everywhere, I really wish I lived in a world where it could be a three-piece suit casually to the bar on Friday.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:42)
Exactly. That's what I'm saying.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:51)
Welcome one, welcome all. I am Adam Ruzzo and this is Recorded Neutral Territory, a Dresden Files reread podcast. Today we're covering chapters four and five of Stormfront, but as always, the spoilers go all the way up through Battleground. Joining me as always is a mysterious client, it's Brian O'Reilly. Hello, Brian.

Baloreilly (01:12)
Adam, how's it going? we're talking about chapter four today. That starts with Dresden meeting Monica Sells. It's approximately 2.35. When they meet, the investigation has been going on for...

hours. maybe saw Dresden at nine in the morning today and we're only going to cover a couple more hours in the following chapters. It's thrill a minute in the beginning of Storm Frontier.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:39)
All right, so the first passage we're going to read is the description of Monica's cells, and it goes like this, quote, ash blonde hair that I thought must be natural after a morbid and involuntary memory of the dead woman's die job.

Her makeup was tasteful and well applied. Her face was fair, friendly, with enough roundness of cheek to look fresh-faced and young, enough fullness of mouth to look very feminine. She was wearing a long, full skirt of palest yellow with brown riding boots, a crisp white blouse, and an expensive-looking green cardigan over it to ward off the chill of early spring. She had to be in good shape to pull off a color combination like that, and she did it."

Baloreilly (02:16)
Definitely selling Monica as more Macy's catalog model than femme fatale. But I will say, he doesn't give her honey blonde hair. It's got to at least be a pale shade of gray.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:29)
She's ambiguous, right? She's very well dressed her makeup's, tasteful and well applied and she looks...

like a normal everyday person, but at the same time, what does that mean? piece of that that I was always kind of like, she had to be in good shape to pull off a color combination like that, and she did it. What does being in good athletic shape have to do with pulling off a color combination? good looking enough that I overlook the weird color combination. Is that what he's trying to say?

Baloreilly (02:55)
I think it's actually that with the green cardigan and the yellow and the brown, she sort of has a lot of color on, it draws the eye. And if she was not put together, if she was not attractive, it would draw the eye to the fact that she's not attractive, but she is, so it's pleasing to look at her.

She's sort of the white picket fence with the dark interior of the home in this story. And I think the ambiguity works on multiple levels where Butcher is, subverting, as many authors do, the idea of the happy American family.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:30)
Absolutely. And one thing we're not going to talk about in this episode, but I think it's worth pointing out so that when we do talk about it later, we can sort of refer back to these moments, is I actually, my memory of these early books is there's a lot more of the male gaze-y stuff. This doesn't have a huge male gaze element to it. He mentions that she has a mouth that's full and she looks very feminine and she's fresh-faced and young and nice looking, but it doesn't feel...

excessive like it does in other parts of the book. In fact, just in the very next chapter, there's a little bit more of that with Susan, and maybe that's by design. So we're gonna put the pin in that and come back to it in a later discussion, and we're gonna move on to the next piece here where she sort of stumbles over her words, talking to Dresden, a lot of ums and ahs, and very anxious. And we know it's because she's playing two sides against the middle She's...

trying to drag Harry into this to deal with her husband in order to keep her kids safe, but she cannot let Victor know that she's the one doing this. So she's doing it in a very cagey way, trying to give as little information to Dresden as possible so that he can maybe deal with the problem and she can be fully hands off.

Baloreilly (04:43)
Butcher does an incredible job here of writing a text that on your reread seems completely different. So on the first read you go through this, Monica seems very nervous. Like she's willing to leave the office at any point. She's practically ready to bolt. Her hiring a wizard? She's a suburban mom. Who would do such a thing? And Dresden of course spends the entire conversation negotiating against himself, right? Well maybe you should go ask somebody else.

They barely get through it, partially maybe because Dresden drops that he just came back from working with the police on a case. And Monica is reassured that there's an institutional authority that also takes him seriously. That's what you get on the first read. On your second read, Monica's not nervous because she feels like Dresden's a wacko. She knows magic is real.

and she's trying to figure out how she can manipulate him into doing what she needs to protect her family. And Dresden is negotiating against himself. She's not sticking around because he's working with the police. She's realizing he's already looking into this and maybe considering whether she has to talk to him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:54)
Yeah.

yeah, that didn't even occur to me, right? The line about the police. You're right, she's realizing that he might already be looking into this, but she's gonna try to make sure, point him in the right direction.

what you were saying before about him negotiating against himself, I think that's a little bit of an inexperienced thing talking. think it's a little confidence issue, right? He has been doing this for a couple of years, but for the most part, he's helping people find lost items, maybe lost pets, maybe teaching one or two people that have a mid-level talent how to control it or whatever.

but he hears, my husband is missing. These are very high stakes now. And it's not he's helping the police with this and really they're the ones that are gonna do the heavy lifting and it's not his job if it fails. If he takes on a case with a missing person and he fails it, maybe that person dies or is never found again or something terrible happens. So he's trying to pass this off. Is this a mundane missing person's case? I'm gonna give it to the police because this is probably beyond my ability. It's him.

recognizing his own limitations.

Baloreilly (06:59)
Right, and I definitely think it's a lack of confidence in his ability to handle something very serious on his own, especially if it's not something he feels like he has expertise in. Because from Harry's perspective, he still functionally doesn't understand why she does want a wizard.

Monica mentions later on her husband's been looking at some magic books. He's become kind of obsessed with it. She thinks it's important. She's not giving away what she actually knows. And Dresden's like, yeah, okay, I get it. But so you want me to find him because he'll listen to somebody who knows about occult stuff? It's very, he needs to warm up to the idea that he's the man for the job. I totally understand when you're selling your own services.

not being fully confident and delivering on stuff you haven't done before. But it's very funny to realize in retrospect that she sort of has to sell him because she has to make sure that he's working on this.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:58)
Yeah, and I think Harry suspects something. We know that Harry has really good instincts. They warn him, right? He almost has a spidey sense, right? Later on in the books, he often says, my instincts screamed and I dodged to the left or whatever, and he just barely avoids getting killed. Then later, I think it might be in peace talks or battlegrounds where they reference that he had some kind of a flash of insight.

And I think it's Ebenezer or maybe listens to when sort of references that his precognizance might be coming in, many wizards tend to get a form of precognizance. And I think these early books might demonstrate that in a little different way. Just as having insight as a detective, like he just, she's not telling me something, there's something else here. after she explains, he was very upset, he lost his job and I'm worried about him, blah, blah, blah, blah, he says,

I'm still not clear on this. Why me? Why not the police? Like he keeps digging into her and demanding more explanations. He's not satisfied with what she gives him.

Baloreilly (08:56)
Right, and one of the interesting things is he's not taking her seriously on magic being important because she, for example, can't pronounce tarot cards correctly. She says tarot, And I think that it's interesting. Dresden keeps wondering whether he's doing the right thing in the sense that he knows he needs money. I shouldn't make this woman sign up with me just because I need her money. I have to be fair to her.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:07)
Right, she calls it

Baloreilly (09:23)
but I think it does blind him not to his misgivings about letting Monica pay him, but to his misgivings about getting involved with this. That's what the money blinds him to because there, you know, she does manage to convince him that him being a wizard will help, but Harry doesn't do a great job of interrogating this sense he has that there's something more to this that she's not saying.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (09:49)
Exactly. And then he gets to the point where he interprets her anxiety, which is, don't want to get caught lying to this guy about my true motives and I'm terrified about my kids and I'm terrified of my husband. All of that boils out into anxiety. And he interprets that as anxiety about the fact that he is a wizard. And then he gives her a little speech trying to explain that he's part of the good team.

that's the next passage going to have us read.

Baloreilly (10:18)
Monica, I told her, there are powers in the universe that most people don't even know about. Powers that we still don't fully understand. The men and women who work with these powers see things in a different light than regular people. They come to understand things in a slightly different way. This sets them apart. Sometimes it breeds unwanted suspicion and fear. I know you've read books and seen movies.

about how horrible people like me are, and that whole suffer not a witch to live part of the Old Testament hasn't made things all roses. But we really aren't any different from anyone else. I gave her my best smile. I want to help you. But if I'm going to do that, you're going to have to give me a little trust. I promise I give you my word that I won't disappoint you.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:08)
We all know how important it is when a wizard or other supernatural creature gives their word. I don't think that's described too much in this book, but it's definitely described later. So it's important that Harry's doing that here. But the other thing I wanted to discuss about this paragraph is something that we're going to see in Butcher's writing. It's very efficient. This paragraph is accomplishing three different things at the same time. First, it's doing a little bit of world building. It's explaining...

why people might be hesitant and worried and anxious about the supernatural The same reason they're anxious about anything they don't understand. this sets certain people apart, it makes people fear them, and then you have witch trials and things like that. So it's giving us a little bit more world building that we got from that earlier chapter. Secondly, it's demonstrating that Harry can be diplomatic and gentle. It's why his business hasn't failed yet.

We see in many of his confrontations in the later books that he's a big wise ass, but he knows how to turn on the charm when it's necessary and part of his business needs him to be charming enough that people will take him at his word and become his client. Thirdly, this paragraph is revealing more about Harry. It sounds.

very sincere to us as the reader. And it is, we know later with our knowledge about Harry that he means what he says here. That he wants to help and he wants her to give him a little trust and if she does, he will be on her side. And that's an important distinction with lots of other protagonists and anti-heroes that are like, well, maybe they kind of are good or bad.

This is Harry's moral code. He's here, he started this business to help people, and that's what he wants to do. So she might be questioning his motives here, as anyone might, he's a stranger, she doesn't know him, but he's being incredibly sincere, and as a reader, I think that comes through when you read this for the first time.

Baloreilly (13:05)
Yeah, definitely a great point about how Harry is not like every hard-boiled detective protagonist in the sense that he is a little bit more bound to some ideals. I also think it's a little funny that Harry says, know you've read books and seen movies about how horrible people like me are. So this is obviously a book about a good wizard. And at the time that Stormfront is coming out, you know, what are actually in the popular consciousness about wizards?

Harry Potter, charmed. know, the craft, okay, early 90s, but we're at the point where Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, know, Willow is a good witch. This is sort of now, TikTok, which is every, girl under 25 has a set of crystals. That's a joke, but experience of engaging in ritual magic has become something that's considered fairly benign.

What is Harry really referencing here? He's referencing his own youth, and perhaps the author's own youth, when the Satanic panic was really at full throat in the late 80s, early 90s, and people who played D &D were being demonized at the pulpit at church on Sunday mornings.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (14:19)
Yeah,

it makes sense that he's not caught up on that zeitgeist because after all, the only exposure he has is going to the drive-through sometimes and seeing older movies. He doesn't get to watch TV, he doesn't know about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Charmed, et cetera, et cetera. So he's still living in, you know, a decade earlier. He takes a while to catch up to those things.

Baloreilly (14:41)
That's an excellent point. So after Harry manages to get Monica to give him her husband's name so he can begin working on the case, they describe one place Victor might be is the lake house. Lake Providence over the state line in Indiana, I'm assuming, around Lake Michigan.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:02)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (15:03)
That

of course is going to become important later in the story, but it's mentioned all the way here in chapter four. They sign up, Monica gives Dresden an envelope with $500 in it, which he says, God, I love this after sending in my rent at the beginning of this month. this will help me pay off last month's late rent and a good chunk of next month's too, if only $500 did that.

And then, when he takes another envelope from Monica's elves, we get our first look at her husband.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (15:33)
Quote, the envelope with the photo in it was next. I took it out and regarded a picture of Monica and a man of lean and handsome features with a wide forehead and shaggy eyebrows that skewed his handsomeness off into a rather eccentric angle. His smile was whiter than white and his skin had the smooth dark tan of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun, boating maybe. It was a sharp contrast against Monica's paleness, Victor Sells, I presume. Unquote.

Baloreilly (16:02)
Man, everybody in the Dresden Files who has a whiter than white smile and artificially tanned skin, I mean, it's just one villain after another, right?

and one thing on a more serious note I like about this description is Cells is clean-cut guy, mostly, but the shaggy eyebrows, the eccentric handsomeness.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:21)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (16:24)
we're beginning to get the sense that he might be a little domineering, a little crazy, you know, that heavy brow kind of reads that way. And it's a really good, subtle description that kind of sets up the sort of person he's revealed to be later.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:38)
So then we get to the third envelope that she provided. We got the money, we got the photo, and now we get the brown husk of a dead, dried scorpion coming out of that third one, what some might call checkoff scorpion. Let's hear what it sounds like.

Baloreilly (16:52)
Quote, a supple braided leather cord let off from a ring set through the base of its tail so that if it was worn it would hang head down, tail up and curled over the drive body to point at the ground. I shuddered. Scorpions are symbolically powerful in certain circles of belief. They weren't usually symbols of anything good or wholesome either.

A lot of petty mean spells could be focused around a little talisman like that. If you wore it next to your skin, as such things are supposed to be worn, the prickly legs of the thing would be a constant poking and agitation at your chest, a continual reminder that it was there. The dried stinger, the tail's tip, might actually pierce the skin of anyone who tried to give the wearer a hug.

its crab-like pincers would catch in a man's chest hair or scratch at the curves of a woman's breasts. Nasty, unpleasant thing. Not evil as such, but you sure as hell weren't likely to do happy shiny things with magic with such an item around your neck.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:54)
boy, yeah, that is an unpleasant sounding talisman. And the way that it's described kind of implies that the focuses, foci, that are good and pure are not going to be that weird and evil and unpleasant feeling, right? It's supposed to be worn in a way that would be a constant.

poking and agitation on your chest, it's supposed to distract you with a little bit of discomfort and pain all the time. It just kind of implies that negative magic, bad magic, evil magic, whatever you want to call it, is always going to have that extra little bit of a cost to the wearer in that circumstance.

Baloreilly (18:38)
I mean, look at what the biggest cost might be. If you get a hug, somebody hugs you, it's gonna injure them. know, talk about the, that's a real Scorpio thing, right? Whatever, if you're an astrologist. But here, it's deathly serious, and it's exactly what's happening to Victor. He's estranged from his family because of a thing. Now, one other thing that's mentioned right after that is here,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (18:46)
yeah.

It pushes people away. Yeah, I didn't think about that.

Baloreilly (19:08)
The darker version of the art magic is described as absorbing his attention. Monica talks about him becoming obsessed with it. doesn't tell us at this point that black magic is addictive.

Victor is being drawn in by a seductive and thralling force that is changing him for the worst. Butcher is really doing a nice job of seeding within his reader the natural instinct that, yeah, that's exactly what black magic does, of course.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (19:36)
Yeah, it can be easily drawing parallels with any other kind of negative addiction that just pulls you down into it and also typically pushes away the people that could help you get out of it.

One of the things I noticed here is many people out there probably are familiar with the idea of Chekhov's gun. Chekhov was a playwright, stream and he basically is famous for saying, if you're going to show a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must be fired in the third, with the idea being that when you're writing, you should write efficiently. Don't add in extraneous details that don't matter, which is...

Baloreilly (19:57)
Play it right.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (20:15)
a little interesting because if you're writing a mystery story and you only put details in there that matter, then a savvy reader is going to read every detail as a clue, which is why the idea of a red herring is a thing. You put some details in there that don't matter or look like they matter, but they matter for different reasons. Because if you want the reader to continue to have a mystery, you can't just only list the things that are important. But...

when you go to this length of time and detail describing this thing and talking about how evil it could be and then say, well, maybe it's not even really a true talisman, no way to know but to channel through it and I'm not gonna do that. You know something's gonna happen with this by the end of the book if you've got a high literacy for this style story.

Baloreilly (21:03)
And Butcher is a great writer because he gives you what he's supposed to, clues to help you understand the mystery and know what's going on.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:09)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (21:11)
and he also hides information from you, like the interaction with Monica and the way to read that the second time through. So you can figure out parts of the mystery because he's giving you clues that are obvious, but some of the things that are later revealed to be hints at a deeper mystery don't immediately jump out as signaling that, even if they're out in plain view.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:33)
The last part of this chapter that I did want to mention really quick is that After Monica leaves and he's working at his desk, he said, once I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, a twitch of motion from the dried scorpion that sat at my desk, I blinked and stared at it. It didn't move. I think this because we know later that Victor is going to pour energy into the thing.

in order to get it to attack Harry. He thinks Harry has it and it turns out that Murphy's in the room with it, et cetera. And later he uses more of the things. If it's twitching now, it doesn't make a lot of sense with what we know of how this magic works, right? Energy has to be poured into it in order to make it come alive. Theoretically, nobody's doing that right now. My own personal opinion is this is a little bit, again, of his instincts or his subconscious or his precognizance telling him...

what's going to happen? This thing is going to come alive.

Baloreilly (22:23)
Right, I think that's a great duality that Butcher sets up for us and is pretty consistent about leaving open to interpretation so far. There are some hunches that Dresden has that could be him kind of knowing things because he's using magic but he's not quite good enough yet, he doesn't have the find control, cells must have a link to this talisman. Maybe Captain Lucio of the Wardens could notice that right away, but maybe Dresden just gets a bad feeling.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:29)
Mm-hmm.

Baloreilly (22:50)
Or maybe it is his precognizance flashing in here and there. It's ambiguous and it's a good job, butcher, of seeding that idea in later book to sort of explain some of these hunches, but also leaving them open to interpretation as just him being a good investigator and a budding talent at wizardry.

One thing we should note before we move on from this chapter is that his interview with Monica is over at 3.15 and then Harry does grunt work for a couple more hours. He gets his phone out and starts calling hospitals to see if Victor's ended up, on a stretcher somewhere before he takes a break and goes for dinner, bringing us to chapter five.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (23:27)
Yeah, so we get our first glorious description of McAnally's, and of course, there's no video games at McAnally's, no TVs, no electronics really, not even a jukebox. We get a player piano, which I don't think has ever actually been playing in any of the books, but maybe we'll find it at some point that my memory is false. But the description of the pub is thus, quote, I say pub in all the best senses of the word.

When you walk in, you take several steps down into a room with a deadly combination of low clearance and ceiling fans. If you're tall like me, you walk carefully in McAnally's. There are 13 stools at the bar, 13 tables in the room, 13 windows set up high in the wall in order to be above ground level. Let some light from the street into the place.

Thirteen mirrors on the walls cast back reflections of the patrons in dim detail and give the illusion of more space. Thirteen wooden columns, carved with the likeness from folktales and legends of the old world, make it difficult to walk around the place without weaving in a circuitous route. They also quite intentionally break up the flow of random energies, dispelling to one degree or another the auras that gather around a broody, grumpy wizard and keeping them from manifesting in unintentional and colorful ways.

The colors are all muted, earth browns and sea greens. The first time I entered Mackinally's, I felt like a wolf returning to an old favorite den.

Baloreilly (24:47)
The last line there, the wolfish smile is a key, perhaps overused, know, dialogue tag for Dresden. But this first description of him as having a wolf-like relationship with the territory or a place, really sparked some fond memories for me. Question, though.

Why all the 13s? He says that the position of things in Machinales is to break up random energies, but he never explains why there's 13 of everything. Does...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:14)
No, I don't remember

them ever really explaining that. That's one of the so-called textural relics where it's just a mystery that we don't know the answer to. Maybe we'll get it by the end of the series or maybe it will just be left for people to speculate about.

Baloreilly (25:28)
I wonder if the idea is that 13 is unlucky because it messes up magic, and that's why everything's in 13s in Max, because Max is trying to keep magic from flaring up in there.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:35)
Hmm

Okay, that's my favorite explanation. That's officially my own headcanon. The other thing that I do like is it just drips with this great feeling. If you've ever gone to a place and felt like, yes, this is my place. This is me, right? Maybe somebody who goes to a library for the first time and it's just like, yes, this is my place. This is where I can go to be me. I felt like a wolf returning to an old favorite den.

The fact that he has that feeling walking into it the first time, I think most people have felt that at some point in their life if they're old enough. They found a place that feels like a great home, even though it's the first time they've been there.

Baloreilly (26:21)
Yeah, I remember when I was a bartender in Manhattan, I would get off from work and I'd always go with a friend of mine who'd meet me after my shift to the same bar a couple blocks away where the same bartender would be working. And I'd just hang out there until I was ready to, you know, finally crash and go to sleep. And every time it felt like, you know, everybody else here, the other customers, they're just visiting. But me, you know, I'm part of the place. One other thing I love...

about this is the columns with the likenesses and folktales and legends of the old world. let's think a little bit about this in the meta. We know from short stories and side conversations that part of what gives supernatural beings to the Dresden Files power is belief in them and knowledge of them. Mac is accorded neutral territory.

for the unselia chords. Maybe part of the deal is he has to spread a little bit of awareness of, you know, some of the various entities who are signed on to that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:21)
like that idea. And those carvings that are on the pillars, those come back into play in White Night, I believe, when Lily and Maeve come to meet Drezden there, and each of them, their presence actually makes the flowers either bloom or freeze and shrivel up when they're walking past those pillars. So that does, that connection,

between them and the Fae is a little bit reinforced by that moment.

Baloreilly (27:51)
Ooh, that's right. I didn't even remember that. Yeah, that's a good point. So Harry walks into Max and, you know, compliments the ale as always, compliments the food as always, the steak specifically. He tells us that he is going to be later doing the dangerous thing that he told us was maybe a bad idea, figuring out how the spell works. I don't know if he should really start doing that after he goes out and has a couple drinks, but...

clearly he needs to decompress after a tough day. Mack greets Dresden right away when he sits down, course, laconically, as always. And then they get to talking about something in the newspaper.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (28:30)
it's talking about Three Eye. So one of the things that I really love about Jim's writing is he does a great job of making sure his reader is never lost. Another example of this happens a little bit earlier in this same chapter where he says, quote, it's gonna be a long night. Once I got home and tried to figure this out, who the hell was that pulled off this death spell used on

Johnny Marcon's hatchet man, Tommy Tom, and his girlfriend, Jennifer Stanton. He's repeating their names and their relationships. And one thing I thought was interesting here is he's reminding you, the reader, Tommy Tom is Johnny Marcon's hatchet man, but he's not reminding you that Jennifer Stanton was part of the Velvet Room and related to Bianca, right? Because earlier they were speculating, well, either of these people might have been the target.

Baloreilly (29:13)
Mmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (29:20)
And later we know that Jennifer Stanton is Monica Sells' sister and that she was threatening to go to the cops and that's why she was killed. And maybe Victor's just using this as a convenient situation like, also I can take out an enforcer for my competition at the same time. But the fact that he reminds us specifically about John Marcon's hatchet man Tommy Tom,

and his girlfriend Jennifer Stanton and doesn't mention her relationship to Bianca, is that because he wants to throw us off that Jennifer Stanton is the real one, the real target of this? Or is it just like, hey, Bianca's is actually coming up in a couple chapters, you're gonna be reminded of that soon, so I don't have to add it in here.

Baloreilly (30:03)
Yeah, Adam, you turned me on to how good Butcher is at economically doing a lot in his chapters. That's a really great example of him subtly putting us on the wrong scent, just as Dresden sort of is a little bit at this point, while not necessarily saying anything that alerts us to the fact that he's shading how we're going to read things.

Dresden starts discussing Third Eye with Mack, this drug that he says is worse than crack. The article details the demolition of a grocery store by a pair of junkies. Dresden and Mack have a conversation where Dresden states that he doesn't think it's possible that Third Eye gives you quote, the third sight, end quote, what we'll later call wizard sight.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:52)
Wrong again.

Baloreilly (30:53)
I mean, it's like clockwork and it's really great, honestly, in retrospect, that this turned into a 25 book series or whatever it's gonna be because Dresden develops so much in terms of his instinct, his ability to be accepting of things that are outside his experience just like other characters do. And yet again, he's just making a mistake about a key sort of detail of what we later come to be find out is tied into the main plot.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (31:20)
Yeah, and it's important that he introduces the concept here because if the first time we learned about Three-Eye is when he sees the junkie in the police station, it just means another paragraph of explanatory text or maybe two or three paragraphs of explanatory text. And that's how you get those uncomfortable exposition dumps in some stories that are just not written as elegantly and well. He just says, hey, what's he gonna do? He's in a bar, he's gonna talk to the bartender about this thing in the newspaper.

we're just gonna make that thing be the important part of the story so that you now know A, there's a drug that's called 3I and B, supposedly it gives someone wizard sight or third sight, I think he changes the name after this book, supposedly it gives him that and C, Harry doesn't believe it and he's gonna be wrong again and he's a lovable goof when he's wrong. So the next piece is another classic sort of misdirection. The bartender looks at him and says, Harry.

you were followed and immediately like, man, there's gonna be some kind of tense confrontation at the bar. That's what's happening, right? Nope, it's the reporter looking for information and she's gonna flirt with him like, no, that's a very different situation than if like a bad guy was coming to threaten you.

Baloreilly (32:29)
And we're gonna get to the description of Susan in just a second, but it's an interesting rhythm that Butcher's starting to establish in these past couple chapters. Misdirection followed by foreshadowing. It's a two-step. So Monica comes in and talks to Harry. Misdirection, we don't actually get a good read of what Monica's concerned with. Foreshadowing the scorpion. Misdirection, the focus is on Tommy Tom. Foreshadowing, third eye.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:41)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (32:55)
Harry, you were followed misdirection followed by foreshadowing. Susan Rodriguez is going to be very important. Quote, she was a woman of average height and striking dark beauty, wearing a crisp business jacket, skirt, hose and pumps. Her dark straight hair was trimmed in a neat cut that ended at the nape of her neck and was parted off the dark skin of her forehead, emphasizing the lazy appeal of her dark eyes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (32:55)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (33:22)
What a femme fatale, right?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:23)
Yeah,

completely had in my head, partly because probably since the last time I had read the books, I had read a bunch of...

different threads of people criticizing the Dresden Files for various reasons. And I remembered those criticisms to in some way be justified. And I was expecting to see a lot more of that excessive male gaze, like describing women from the legs up kind of a thing. And he doesn't really do that here when he describes the first three women of the series when they first enter the room. Now, he's going to do that a little bit more with Susan here, but

that does feel right for the scene because she is flirting with him. And he is trying to figure out how to respond to that appropriately. He's not very good at flirting is what we learned here. But the fact that he's starting to notice her because she is purposefully flirting with him, it feels right in this scene. I've read through this chapter trying to decide, does this scene make me feel a little weird? And the answer was no.

We will get to scenes that make me feel a little weird and probably make other people feel weird and we're gonna talk a lot more about the male gaze element at those points, but that's a great element of the femme fatale entering the scene without a lot of extra creepiness thrown in.

Baloreilly (34:43)
and it's appropriate that things are going to get a little bit more descriptive of Susan in the scene for another reason, we find out of course that Harry and Susan have a lot of chemistry. mean, right, we don't need to bring death masks just yet, but Harry and Susan are explosive together.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (34:54)
and history.

Baloreilly (35:04)
They are two people who are very attracted to each other, even if they sort of aren't saying that part out loud yet. And when I was a single 25 year old man, and a woman I had a lot of chemistry with was sitting across from me, I definitely did notice that she was pretty. That's a thousand percent I can admit to doing that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:05)
Yeah?

Baloreilly (35:24)
We talk about Susan, her job, she works for the Arcane, which is effectively the National Enquirer, but if it was focused on witchier, occultier stuff and fewer Is Elvis Still Alive stories, though I think that actually is mentioned at another point as an Arcane thing. But, Harry says that once in a great while, the Arcane is right, and he tells us about one of those times.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:47)
Quote, like the Unsealian incursion of 1994, when the entire city of Milwaukee had simply vanished for two hours, gone. Government satellite photos showed the river valley covered with trees and empty of life or human habitation. All communication ceased. Then a few hours later, there it was, back again, and no one in the city itself was the wiser. Unquote. Textural.

Baloreilly (36:08)
What happened? What happened, Jim? You have to tell me! Still never explained, whatever this is.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (36:17)
Textural ruin is right there. Now, the other thing that we learned upon doing a bit of research here is that 1994 is when the accords were signed. So it's easy to speculate that this incident is what encouraged the various Mab and or the other supernatural community to come together and put this thing together. It's called the Unseelie Incursion of 1994, which implies that Mab had something to do with it.

Maybe it was Winter's forces that got out of control and accidentally teleported the city into Faerie or something weird like that. And so she felt the responsibility to fix it so that that never happened again because we know that the Queens If they wrong someone, they must account for it. And if someone wrongs them, they must account for it. So.

it's possible that Mabb put together the accords as a sort of restitution for what she had done to mortal kind in that particular incident, the unseelie incursion of 1994, because she couldn't really give like a ware guild to all the people of Milwaukee, but she could put into place something so that it wouldn't happen again.

Baloreilly (37:28)
And of course, the Queen of Air and Darkness wouldn't have engineered this situation just to have an excuse to create an accord between the supernatural nations before a star-born cycle was about to begin. She wouldn't have done anything like that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (37:44)
We know that she absolutely could have been doing this, not only for the Starborn reasons, but also because they're her accords, she is in part responsible for enforcing them. And so that gives her power.

Baloreilly (38:00)
So come on, Jim, if you're listening, just shoot me an email. Tell me I'm right. Come on, just tell me. Okay, so after that fascinating sidebar that just, we just move right past, we get more about Susan. We find out that Susan tricked Harry, Adam, as you mentioned, into soul gazing him one of the times that somebody gets one over on Harry. Marcon, of course, did it in an earlier chapter. We find out that Susan did the same thing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:03)
Just tell us. We won't tell anyone, I swear.

Baloreilly (38:27)
And then, as you were talking to me about before the show, we see that Susan has even more upper sleeve.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:34)
Yeah, she then goes to flirt with him it's very clear that unlike Murphy, who Harry interprets as manipulating him when she implores him to help her, he's like, classic Damsel in distress. She knows just how to push my buttons, right? We don't read it that way. Maybe some other people do, but when we were talking about that chapter, Brian and I kind of agreed that that's not what's happening in reality. That's just how Dresden is seeing it through his lens. And,

in this scene, it's very clear that Susan is trying to manipulate him a little bit, but it's flirting and it's unclear at this point in time how much of that is manipulation and how much of that is she really likes him. And we'll learn by the next couple of books that they actually become an item. So it's clear in hindsight that this is sincere to some degree. She's flirting with him and she's using

her reporting job as a reason to start the flirting, right? It's sort of an icebreaker. Like she leaned toward me enough that a glance down would have afforded me a single interesting angle to the V of her white shirt. And then later she complains, you never looked at my cleavage once, did you? Like it's just a fun conversation between two people that are definitely into each other.

Baloreilly (39:50)
Yes, and one thing about this that I think is made pretty clear by the conversation they're having is that Susan... Harry's terrible at thinking about how other people see him. Susan sees a guy who, if you're into the stuff he's into, is probably the most knowledgeable person about the supernatural and the arcane she's ever met. He's not hideous to look at.

Some people, you know, like tall partners, Dresden's very tall, doesn't seem to be a problem for Susan. She finds him fascinating. And he's really unable to conceptualize that for her, he really is somebody that she's excited to hang out with. He's so cool.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:32)
Because the way that she's described in most of the books is being passionate about her job. She loves to dig up information that other people don't know and publish it. curiosity is like a forefront of her personality. So the fact that Harry has all of this knowledge that she can't access any place else, it's gotta be like catnip to her.

Baloreilly (40:56)
Right. And one other thing that happens in this conversation is that Harry reveals to us that in a soul gaze, he found out that Susan had quote, no concept of just how attractive she really was, end quote. And one thing I love about this is I think it's another maybe clue or...

ambiguous statement that allows us to interpret that Harry is really bad at understanding how people perceive him and how other people, at this point in his life, process their own insecurities. Susan not knowing how attractive she was is something that Harry thinks of as, you know, girls are sort of mythical creatures. He's, everyone he's known has died. He doesn't have a lot of experience with them. But Susan, woman in the early 2000s,

probably just doesn't think she's skinny enough and therefore has body dysmorphia and doesn't think she's very attractive, even though, of course, anybody looking at her would disagree with that sentiment. Harry interprets soul gazes and other information he gets about people in a way that lines up with his own trauma, his own emotional responses to things that might be very different from their own internal understanding of what they're going through.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:04)
Yeah, absolutely. The metaphors involved in those soul gases are definitely, I think the way that they're described is they're always true, but you are the one that has to figure out exactly what they mean. And they're open to misinterpretation. So they could be 100 % accurate and you could still get it wrong because they are vague in a way. So I do love your idea that she's got a little dysbiosis morphia and his brain interprets that as

she doesn't really know that she's pretty. Like, if she didn't think she was at least a little pretty, she wouldn't be trying to use her feminine wiles on him in this way and flirting in this way. She wouldn't feel confident about herself enough to do that. But if she's got a little body dysmorphia, and of course Dresden doesn't know anything about that, even though that phrase was something that we knew about in the 2000s and it was kind of part of the zeitgeist. You know, people would talk about bulimia and things like that.

Baloreilly (42:39)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:57)
It wasn't something that Harry would really know about or read about, I don't think. It's not something that he would talk about with somebody at the water cooler, right? He just doesn't watch the news the same way other people do.

Baloreilly (43:08)
Right, and he's certainly not picking up People magazine. Now, we get more of Harry and Susan's interaction. Susan asks him a million questions that he can't answer about the case that she somehow knows that he's on, which is interesting. I don't know if that's explained how she knows that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:10)
Right.

I think she's

guessing or maybe she has a source that tipped her off that, you know, a tall man was seen leaving the building where the murder took place. And she's like, yeah, 90 % that's Dresden. She knows SI is on the case. A tall guy was seen leaving. I'm gonna go pump him for information.

Baloreilly (43:38)
That I think is probably what it is. And it makes me speculate as to who her source could be, but we don't know. Is she friends with Stallings? Like, how does she know this? But anyway, so Susan has figured this out and continues to question Harry and question Harry and question Harry. And then one of her questions is, would you mind having dinner with me Saturday night?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:56)
Yeah, and he says, no, no, wait, what? And he's completely flustered by it because he's interpreted their relationship as semi-antagonistic, like frenemies. it's my job to not tell her anything. It's her job to try to get some information out of me. And every once in a while when it's not important, when it's not like high stakes, like dead bodies situation, he might.

Tell her about it, just because, you know, smaller things, he probably doesn't mind spending time with her and he's willing to share that information. But that's how he's always interpreted the relationship, more of a business relationship. And now she's bringing it into a personal relationship and he is not prepared for that at all. As we've talked about he has trauma with personal relationships and he probably doesn't feel ready for it, but he kind of gets tricked into it. Like his brain, part of his body, I'm not gonna say which part.

definitely wants this to happen, but he's got anxiety issues related to this, so he's never been pursuing it, right? He doesn't ask her out because of all of his own baggage, but when he's sort of tricked into saying yes, he doesn't wanna go back on it because he does wanna go out with her.

Baloreilly (45:06)
he really does treat her the way he treats his most stable female relationship at this point, the lananchi, where he can't back out of a contract once he said yes. And also she's gotta be manipulating him. It can't just be that, you know, she is gonna pump in for information, yes, but she doesn't go out to dinner with every source for every article. know, Susan's asking him out because she doesn't mind mixing a little bit of business and pleasure here and it's definitely

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:16)
Ha ha ha.

Baloreilly (45:34)
part of the pleasure for her is getting to spend time with him in this situation. But Harry can't just agree with that, can't just accept that. There's gotta be some level where this is, I'm in trouble.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:46)
had I just agreed to a date or an interrogation session is a pretty good line. And probably both is his answer. The last piece I did want to mention here is she says, you most men are off balance by now. What is your problem, Dresden? Like this is before she asks him out and he says, I am pure of heart and mind. I cannot be corrupted, which I thought was especially interesting because for the rest of the series, if there's one thing that you can say about Dresden that makes him special.

compared to every other wizard in the whole series, every other character in the whole series, he is uncorruptible. He is given the most tempting offers imaginable for everything, power, money, pleasure, it doesn't matter. He says no to all of it and the one time he says yes, he arranges it so that, spoilers, he will be killed.

when his mission is completed so that he cannot be turned to the dark it's incredible how uncorruptible he is, and I have to imagine that's something to do with his star-born nature.

Baloreilly (46:51)
I think it definitely has to do with that, but I also think that it's part of just a character trait I really love about Dresden. He would never tell you this. Dresden thinks that he's a practical guy who is just trying to do the job and, you know, focus on what he's doing. But Dresden is truly a bleeding heart idealist. He is uncompromisingly committed to what he thinks is good. He's pretty philosophical about it. He has a pretty evolved understanding of what

good means, knowing that there are trade-offs, there are lesser evils. He has a very nuanced ethical view and he is uncompromising with how he adheres to it. To the point where sometimes people will make ethical arguments to him that he won't accept, but later you can realize that they have softened his perceptions because he's not just someone who is

purely devoted to what he believes, he's somebody who's constantly trying to improve his idea of what the good is and what he should be doing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (47:55)
Yeah, he's not inflexible. Like, he's stubborn, for sure, but people can convince him that he's wrong about things if they do a good enough job arguing with him about it. And we see that happen multiple times, and we'll certainly talk about that when we get to it. Speaking of his idealism, I think that brings us right to our question for Bob.

Baloreilly (48:18)
So we're gonna ask Bob today how noir the Dresden files are. So Bob, what's the answer?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:25)
Well, as a Skull, Bob would have some really good insight into noir. Unfortunately, he was booked on another podcast. Well, it's a podcast about a romance series. I haven't heard of it. It's called A Court of Thorns and Roses. Apparently, it's very popular. I can see why he would want to be there. But in the meantime, we will try to answer for him. So why don't we first try to go about defining noir?

Baloreilly (48:33)
Which one?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:51)
It turns out it's a very tricky definition. And I've got some good useful quotes here that I'm gonna pull out. there is a distinction between noir tropes and hard-boiled tropes. Often they overlap, but they do appear to be distinctly different things. a good quote from Lothar Tupman who said, the term hard-boiled.

was first used in recipes from the 1730s referring to hard-boiled eggs. Mark Twain was the first to use it in regard to language describing a non-flexible rules of grammar in 1886. Then in the first years of the 20th century, it is used to describe stiff clothing and hats. And by the end of World War I, it was describing a morally inflexible person. And that's where we get to the idea of, this is jumping in, that's where we get to the idea of a hard-boiled detective is someone

who can't be manipulated, right? They've got their own code, or maybe they've got nihilism and they just won't let you mess with them. They're gonna do what they're gonna do with their client, et cetera. And then it closes by saying, quote, the qualities of cynicism, self-reliance, whether justified or delusional, and acknowledgement of the institutional corruption are where noir and hard-boiled meet, but they aren't synonymous. So that's a good sort of description of the two, but the other one that I really liked is this one.

from author and academic Megan Abbott, who described,

and order has, to a certain extent, been restored.

Baloreilly (50:39)
So an interesting thing about the difference between hard-boiled and noir is that film noir has a little bit more to do with hard-boiled detective stories than noir fiction does. They're slightly different genres. So when we use the term noir here, we're referring to the fiction, not necessarily film noir, though it is important to realize that we're pointing out a distinction here.

These things are all very close cousins that have more in common than they do differences.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:08)
yeah, the

lines between these things are very Megan Abbott goes on to describe noir as different from hard-boiled because as opposed to hard-boiled where the hero's done the right thing to some extent and has some success, in noir, typically, everyone is fallen. Right and wrong are not clearly defined and maybe not even attainable. So noir tends to be more depressing and cynical. And specifically,

Some of the definitions of noir that I have seen have involved being cynical of institutions and people. But as we were talking about earlier, Dresden only appears to be cynical of institutions, which makes sense given his history with the Wardens.

Baloreilly (51:47)
Mm-hmm.

Right, mean Harry, of course, day one has been under attack by the large institutions, the foster care system, the White Council in his life, and has found salvation in individual people. Elaine, Ebenezer, and you know the characters we meet later on throughout the series.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:09)
Absolutely. So my take on the question how noir is the Dresden Files is we kind of have to split up noir and hard boiled because I think there's more hard boiled than there is noir in the Dresden Files overall. there's another quote that I have here. Noir stories, particularly in film and literature are known for their use of similes, often juxtaposed or exaggerated to create a vivid and often cynical atmosphere.

as seen in the writing of Raymond Chandler, unquote. Raymond Chandler, who wrote The Big Sleep and the Philip Marlowe books. is very evident as an influence for the Dresden files. For example, the line we used earlier, the first time I walked into McAnally's, it felt like a wolf returning to an old favorite den, or mailman who looked like a basketball with arms and legs and a sunburned head. Compare and contrast those with these similes from The Big Sleep. The plants.

That sounds like a line that might come from a Dresden Files book.

Baloreilly (53:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the language that Butcher uses is very evocative of noir fiction and hard-boiled fiction, and film noir voiceover is the whole panoply. Moreover, the Dresden files are noir in the sense that the hero is a somewhat fallen character in his own self-perception. Dresden, under the doom of Damocles,

Morgan later we find out thinks he might be the destroyer, right? Has experienced a lot of trauma, has killed before he turned 18, has accidentally killed people he loved, his mother died giving birth to him, in Dresden's head. He is a fallen character. But he is trying to do the right thing, and the one thing that makes him especially hard-boiled

especially in earlier works, is that he does believe there is a right thing to be done. The amount of noir tropes, however, do, in my opinion, fade as the series goes on.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:19)
we can pretty much draw a line to who instilled those values in him, right? Ebenezer is clearly the main source of his ideas of, need to be a good person and I need to do good things with magic. Ebenezer saved him when he was going to die. He acted as a great mentor for him and it helped him frame his life and what he could.

Baloreilly (54:33)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:44)
do with it as a good thing. It helped him feel good about himself again, which the first time I remember reading through the books and when he finds out that Ebenezer was the black staff, Harry's response to that is so vitriolic. He is so, sworn that maybe Ebenezer had killed his mother or something. Like Harry is pretty furious when he finds out about that. And it's because his bedrock, his,

understanding of himself and the world around him were built on the values that Ebeneezer told him.

Baloreilly (55:14)
Right, and that's clearly a key part of his self-identity. His ethic is what defines him. When the bedrock of that is rocked, he's really rocked to his core. One interesting thing I'll note that we'll get to the Reddit answers in just a second, I personally think about the series, is it actually has two peaks of noir in it. The first three books, I think, use a lot of noir tropes and very deliberately do so. I also think that after Deadbeat,

perhaps after proven guilty, but especially White Knight, Small Favor, and Turncoat are a return to a sort of noir plot structure that is evocative of the earlier books, even though Butcher's personal style is a bigger influence, I think, on the actual construction of the chapters.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (56:04)
to bring it back around, while we just described Harry as having these ideals and trying to do the right things, those aren't always the tropes that you find in characters that lead noir or even hard-boiled type detective fiction. They're often more cynical about everyone. For example, in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is the main character. He's a private investigator. And this quote sort of stood out to me.

He's being sort of questioned by the district attorney and the district attorney says, why shouldn't you tell us what you know if you have nothing to conceal? And Spade responds thus, quote, everybody has something to conceal, unquote. And that doesn't remind me of Dresden. You know who that reminds me of? It reminds me of Hugh Laurie's character on House. That is what a real cynic looks like. And he's a jerk.

He's a jerk to everyone and he assumes that everyone has some kind of ulterior motive and he assumes that everybody's lying to him. Everybody lies is like his main shtick on that first couple of seasons. And Dresden does not treat people that way.

Baloreilly (57:11)
Funny sidebar about House, course. House, doctor solves mysteries nobody else can solve. Sounds kind of similar to Holmes, the great detective who solves mysteries nobody else can solve. And Harry is in that tradition of a detective who solves mysteries that nobody else can solve, but he's more...

like the traditional Sherlock Holmes than House, because he does have that sort of sense that he really can, in a way, make the world a more right place in sort of progressive sense. And other more direct noir fiction protagonists don't really have that sense that they can fix anything in terms of a bigger picture idea.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:52)
Absolutely. I did have a couple other comparisons that I wanted to make before we go to the answers from Reddit. One is in The Big Sleep, Sam Spade does have a lot of sarcastic wise assery that reminded me of Harry. For example, sorry, not Sam Spade. In The Big Sleep, it's Philip Marlowe, where somebody says, tall, aren't you? And he said, I didn't mean to be. And then another one was asked about his previous occupation, he says, I was fired for insubordination.

I test very high on insubordination. And it definitely, those lines could have been at Dresden lines for sure when I was reading through those.

Baloreilly (58:21)
You

So from Reddit, we have some great answers. Elphich47, again, had a good one for us. And a lot of people echoed this sentiment. It started pretty hard, boiled, especially the first couple of books. The PI was shady with a heart of gold. The cops are untrustworthy. The mobsters are despicable, but with an honorable streak. And many of the women are femme fatales.

After the third book, the series starts to outgrow its roots as it finds its own path. It grows and fits and starts. It hasn't completely shed those roots, but it's definitely become something else. And a lot of people echoed, and I agree with that first three book sentiment. Do you agree with that, Adam? Do you think that's, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:00)
Yeah, I think so. And

from listening to Butcher's interviews, it sounds like he originally thought of the series as mostly sticking to that, like, the book starts with Harry being called in on a case. Maybe it's the police calling him, maybe it's a mysterious person walking into his office that hires him to do something that's more than it seems. Like, that kind of procedural cop solving a mystery thing. Maybe it's a fae coming to him.

and you know, like small favor kind of fits that bill a little bit, but it definitely outgrows that and changes. And I think that's important because imagine 20 books that are all following that same pattern. We know from interviews with Jim Butcher that he didn't want to do formulaic stuff. And I think he branches out and tries to do different things and tell different stories without sticking to the same procedural of, this is a case. He takes on the case and then he tries to solve it. And...

That is important to make, keep the story fresh. 20 books of the same thing over and over again would get tired.

Baloreilly (59:59)
The funny thing is nobody has that 20 books of the same thing over and over again with this urban fantasy detective genre where it's really, really good, really, really high quality. And it's funny that the first... Yeah, yeah.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:11)
I was gonna say there are others that exist, when

you counted, when you added that extra conditional, then yes, that's true.

Baloreilly (1:00:16)
And it's very funny that Butcher's the first person to do it at that level of quality, and part of his reaction to it is, well, and of course I've got to bring it to sort of some big meta-plot finish, which I love, but I do understand people who wish that alternate series existed that was just, you know, the Hardy Boys of high quality,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:36)
because for the people that really like that thing, and I could definitely see myself enjoying that because it is right up my alley, right? I know, for example, I think I referenced Murphy Napier on YouTube has done a lot of recent reviews of the Dresden Files. She just finished reading the whole series.

she in her early reviews was like, man, mean, if these, she's like on book two or three and she's like, if every book is just like the same sort of thing, like a procedural cop thing, I'm probably not gonna finish it. And because it changed, it won her over as a reader, essentially.

Baloreilly (1:01:08)
And Freshly Stabbed makes a great point about why it might have changed so notably after Grave of Peril III book. Quote, I think a good bit of why it changed is that Summer Night was the first book he started writing.

as a published author. When he sat down to start Summer Night, he was a published novelist with one book in readers' hands and two more in the publishing pipeline. He had feedback. He could take direction. He could read reviews. He was getting fan mail. He could see what connected. And presumably, what Freshly Stabbed is suggesting is, rather than continuing to borrow from the noir style to sort of fill everything in, Jim was able to develop his personal style in accordance with the feedback he was receiving.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:01:53)
Yeah, that's an excellent point. And I actually didn't realize that he had sort of written those three books before the first one was even published. And honestly, that makes Grave Peril's quality a lot more interesting. It's entirely possible that he got some good feedback from his publisher while he was writing Grave Peril, because to me, feel like Grave Peril is the first really good quality book. I think Stormfront is actually better than people give it credit for. Everybody really is down on full moon and I get why.

Baloreilly (1:02:03)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:21)
I still enjoy reading it. I still don't think it's a bad book, but I can see why people say that. But Grave Peril is the first book that I read and I go, man, there is something really good here. And it makes me really excited to read the next book, even though I'm on a reread. Like I know what happens, but I still really want to read the next book after Grave Peril.

Baloreilly (1:02:38)
It's funny because I'm one of the people who thinks I broadly agree with that thesis, but I tend to believe that I feel like the arc of quality is a lot flatter than people assume about the first three books. And I'm a really huge summer night truther. So we'll talk about that when it comes up. But I wanna talk about something Prodigal Sunspot added, I would say that it, the series, started out as moreish. And I see a lot of Robert Parker Spencer.

who was modeled after Philip Marlowe, the OG noir detective, in the flippant dialogue, but not the economy of language you find in those books. Once you get into turncoat, it feels like straight up urban fantasy. Now I sort of disagree about turncoat as I said. Changes definitely, I agree, has moved into full higher fantasy level. But I find it really, I've read some...

of Spencer, Robert Parker's character. They're fabulous. If you like this stuff, go read them. They're more modern Marlowe or some of the older characters. But I do think that it's interesting. I don't think that's a knock on Butcher, that he's not as economical as Parker. Parker is truly brilliant in his laconic phrasing.

And I think that maybe, Butcher actually said this at one point, that he modeled some things about Dresden off of Spencer, some ways that Dresden spoke off of Spencer. And I think that it's a bit more than an homage. He really learned something that you can't always, you're not a better Jedi than Master Yoda, but he's definitely gotten to a place where I think the economy, as Adam was talking about earlier in chapter, is a real strength in the series.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:14)
Yeah, absolutely. Nadashot brought up another interesting counterpoint saying, I'd say it is noir throughout, but the genre was never meant to sustain such a long series. I look at the law and I see hard-boiled through and through, unquote. So I think I tend to agree. It's almost like those tabletop RPGs.

that are designed to be a one-shot. They're not designed to be a giant campaign that lasts three years. They're specifically designed just for this self-contained story. The noir genre kind of feels more like that because if you try to tell a long-form story in a world that's depressing and where nothing ever goes right, is anybody gonna wanna keep reading in that universe for that long? I don't know.

Baloreilly (1:05:00)
Definitely not, and I think that it's really interesting that I totally agree with what Nadasada is saying here. Butcher does more deliberately maintain many of the noir elements in the later short stories as opposed to the later books. I think that's cool. One, I also think it's an interesting choice for the short stories. The point of the short stories is that they're not problems that push Dresden to his limit.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:15)
Hmm.

Baloreilly (1:05:27)
So what is he going to do instead? He's going to make them more of a classic mystery, where it's about figuring out what happened, not about the ultimate confrontation.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:35)
Yeah, and the classic mystery is also right up my alley, which is probably why I enjoy all the books, regardless of how noir or hard-boiled they are. That having been said, we're running a little long here. Any final thoughts before we close it out today?

Baloreilly (1:05:42)
Definitely.

Well, I just want to mention what next week's question for Bob is, what extent is Monica Sells morally culpable for the events of Stormfront? That's what we're gonna get to next time.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:00)
That's a great question. A lot of these are very open-ended and they lead to great discussions. No real wrong answers. This, by the way, is the first episode, if you're listening to it, sometime the week of March 19th or so, that you might be able to jump on the Reddit and answer that question. If you have any questions that you think would make for good questions to ask Bob, I'm sure he'll get here eventually. Go ahead and send them to us, Mac@rnt.fm, m-a-c at rnt.fm. So we hope to hear from you. You can send us your answers to our questions, or you can send us questions you think that would need good answers. And until then, this is Adam for Bryan reminding you, be very careful of how you answer the Pretty Reporter.