Starting with Storm Front, published in 2000, Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files is a series that fuses the genres of detective fiction and contemporary fantasy. With fifteen novels and a number of short stories in the series, to date, Butcher has achieved commercial and critical success in the emerging field of urban fantasy. A television show was even based upon Butcher’s series. This paper will argue that the successful fusion of two previously disparate genres, detective and fantasy fiction, utilizing the strengths of both genres, is the key to Butcher’s success. One strength of detective novels is the fruitful use of location, as in Sherlock Holmes’ London. Butcher places his fictional detective, Harry Dresden in contemporary Chicago. This urban location is important, for as the novelist Eudora Welty wrote, “place has a good deal to do with making the characters real, that is, themselves and keeping them so.” The realness of Harry Dresden is crucial to the success of the series. A strength of fantasy fiction, especially in an extended series, is the immersive quality created by successful world building, including devising a coherent set of non-human beings with a shared and intricate history. Butcher succeeds in this endeavor through the use of iconic fantasy creatures, updated and re-imagined, such as vampires, werewolves, faeries, demons, and angels, as well as the deployment of special powers, such as magic. This presentation will show how Butcher’s utilization of these and other features of the two genres, detective and fantasy fiction, have produced a body of work that has placed him in the forefront of the new genre of urban fantasy.
About the presenterDavid C. Wright Jr.
David C. Wright, Jr. is Professor in the Department of History and Government at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA. Trained as an historian of modern France at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, more recently, he has presented conference papers on detective fiction, fantasy and science fiction, and rock music. He is co-editor of, and contributor to, “Space and Time: Essays on Visions of History in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television,” published by McFarland.