Started rereading Storm Front and I had forgotten how much the tone was different. Dresden is such a nice cute puppy that you want to scratch under chin, all while trying to maintain that “noir detective” vibe. And trying to stand everything up while trying to keep the vibe of “some of these characters know each other”. I like it, but it is obviously Dresden very early in his career.
Edit
The perspective is much more binary with less shades of grey and the characters are all much more “one note”. Murphy is the character that is much more schizophrenic in that regard - in one scene she is hammering on Dresden, the next she is tucking him in with a blanket and teddy bear. The story structure is overall similar to the later Dresden stories, a primary villain and a support “obstacle”, but the presentation is much more muddled in comparison to the later stories.
I think that “less shades of grey” is just to be expected in the first installment of a series, and particularly when the author was so young. I think all of us are “less shades of grey” when we’re young and get a lot more nuanced as we experience more of life. If you compare Storm Front as a first novel to The Aeronaut’s Windlass (first book of Jim’s Cinder Spires series), there’s a huge difference in complexity and level of nuance. Jim has clearly matured enormously over the years (no surprise).