Self-Deprecation
The narrator of the story, Harry Dresden, starts out his tale with the terse, stripped down prose common to hard-boiled detective prose. Things do not stay within the semantic range. The narrator has a way with words that moves away from the just-the-facts quality that kicks things off and into a much more deprecatory tone that extends to things around him as well as himself:
“They say that you’re the real thing, Mister Dresden. A real magus.”
“They also say I’m nutty as a fruitcake.”
Harry Feminist
His offbeat take on the world around him often allows for Dresden’s narration to provide insight into his manner of thinking. The brain producing the prose seems for the most part to be decent; he’s not that kind of Wizard. You know the type. He’s hip, he’s woke, he’s now. Or, well, as much as he can be:
“Maybe my values are outdated, but I come from an old school of thought. I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts.”
Bob the Skeptic
Bob inhabits a skull. He’s a spirit and he can talk, but, you know, whatever he says, you have to realize it it is coming from an entity that lives inside a skull. Of course, one can make the argument that we all live inside a skull, but this metaphor doesn’t go there. It is just a reaction to the idea of Harry as a feminist:
“Harry," Bob drawled, his eye lights flickering smugly, "what you know about women, I could juggle.”
The Mailman
The story opens with Harry Dresden getting mail. Don’t worry, it picks up big time from there. But the mailman seems to be a very important character; he is described in an outsized manner in an outsized detail. The metaphor is rich:
“The new mailman, who looked like a basketball with arms and legs and a sunburned, balding head, was chuckling at the sign on the door glass.”
A Rare Treasure
The metaphor which means the most to Harry comes early, directed to him by the man who wants to hire him. The guy miscalculates the daily cost of doing so, overcharging himself unwittingly. When Harry corrects him, slicing that potential income by two-hundred bucks, the man beams:
“An honest man is a rare treasure.”
