Jim Butcher is the author of the New York Times bestselling fantasy series The Dresden Files, which has been adapted for TV, audio books and now a graphic novel, with the release of Storm Front Vol. 1. He is also working on the finale of his high-fantasy Codex Alera series. Turn Coat, Butcher’s most recent novel about Chicago private eye/wizard Harry Dresden, has just been published. Words: Abbie Bernstein

How did you come up with the concept for The Dresden Files?

I was taking classes at the University of Oklahoma School of Professional Writing. To give you an idea of what an idiot I was, I was sceptical of the course, because I had an English Lit degree, so I thought I knew what I was talking about! I thought, ‘What does this professor know about writing novels, and what qualification does she have, except for the 40 novels she’d published?’ [laughs]

I wrote the first Dresden book in an effort to prove to the teacher how wrong she was about what she was trying to teach us about writing. I just decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to be a good little writing zombie and do everything she tells me to do, follow all her rules and fill out her worksheets and outline and chart everything and there, I’ll show her how wrong she is,’ and I wrote the first book of The Dresden Files - and learned something about myself, namely that sometimes I’m not all that bright!

When I put the character together, I looked at lots of long-standing private eyes – great big long series, that’s what I was aiming for. And at the time, I was too dumb to know how improbable that this would develop into a book series, so I just went ahead and planned it that way.

So I’m looking at Spenser, Travis McGee, Kinsey Milhone and finding out the things they have in common. Firstly all have a code of ethics they stick to. It might not be a normal one, but they don’t deviate from it and they don’t back off. Secondly, they all have a tremendous amount of physical and/or mental endurance in terms of what they’re willing to put up with in order to get things done and get to the end of their case. And the third thing they all had in common was they all have the ability to mouth off to absolutely anybody, regardless of how capable that person is of squashing them flat.

So those were the characteristics I wanted to take for my character. Then I looked at classical wizard figures and started going through them, Gandalf and Merlin and Alanan and Belgarath, these figures that I considered to be wizardly archetypes. I tried to see what they had in common with the private eyes, and the common traits that they all shared was that they were all bright, they were all nosy and they were all grumpy!

Turn Coat is the 11th book in the Dresden Files and is, shall we say, eventful. Do you consider it a game-changer in the series?

Well, yeah. Harry has been at a couple of the critical points of this whole big story that’s happened, but this is the first time it’s really going to be making direct alterations to his life.

I never wanted Dresden to be some kind of big, mighty fantasy epic hero-type character. He’s just sort of a medium-sized, quick-on-his-feet fish in the pond, instead of the big fish in the pond. The events of this book has made his world a lot more dangerous and paranoid, which should be fun in the future.

How much of the plot did you have mapped out when you started this book?

The creative process for me is really mixed up, because I’ve got a basic timeline of a very raw skeleton of events that I want to happen, so in that sense, I’ve had the events of Turn Coat planned out for a while. But when it comes to the specifics of who gets what done, that usually is something I haven’t decided until I’m actually working on the book. So while I knew in this one the overall story and what was going to happen in terms of the White Council politics, I didn’t necessarily know exactly who was going to be affected with what outcome.

Certain characters are very altered by the end of the book, and in one case gone. Did you have any pangs about this?

No, not at all. I’ve got the creepy omniscient author viewpoint, so I know what’s going to happen down the line and I know what’s happening here, so the way it appears to the folks who are out in the audience doesn’t look the same way from backstage.

I’ve never really been of the school that says everybody has to come home alive and it has to be a happy ending for everyone. If I kill a character off, I want to give them a death that’s somehow worthwhile. In this particular case, if you’re going to go down, that was exactly the way that character needed to go down. So it was artistically and thematically appropriate. There are a lot of people who don’t get to die as well as a fictional character does.

What else have you got coming up?

I’m going to be doing an anthology of the Dresden short stories, which will probably be out next year,. I’m including a couple of new ones in the anthology, one of which I’ll probably just call ‘Hawaii’ and it will be Murphy’s story when she went off to Hawaii with Kincaid. And I’m also right now working on the finale of the Codex Alera series. In the next Dresden book, Book Twelve, I will say this – there’s a personal apocalypse going on. It’s not on the scale of the world, just on the scale of Harry’s world.

What do you hope people get from your books?

What I most hope people get out of the books is a good time. I should probably have a higher literary aspiration, but really, I just want people to read the books. I want the book to be so good that they stay up late reading it, and when they get to the end, they say, ‘Oh, cool! That was a good book!’ That’s really what I’m looking for.

Turn Coat and Storm Front Vol. 1 are out now.