The Chopping Blog

Harry Dresden is a magical PI in Chicago with all the familiar fixtures of a Chandler mystery: a down-on-his-luck detective, a corrupt city, a femme fatale, and a secret too dangerous to name.

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"The world that we live in is deeply fucked... and I don't want to read about that right now."

Chandler drew heavily from Arthurian legend. One of his early fictional detectives was even named “Mallory,” a direct nod to Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. He later renamed the character Marlowe.

In noir, the detective is hired to do a job—usually to find someone or uncover some buried truth—but the story unfolds more like a quest than a casefile.

At the heart of noir is a central tension: the world is corrupt, maybe even irredeemable—but the protagonist refuses to be.

"One of the most significant lessons I’ve learned along the way is to protect my creativity at all costs."

"Be tenacious. And find fellow writers who challenge you, and who understand this crazy journey is absolutely essential to staying sane and leveling up your craft."

"I finally did get that contract, about 25 years after I started."

The Maltese Falcon doesn’t just shift the tone of crime fiction—it shifts the structure.

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The novel is structured differently than a traditional mystery. Instead of a tightly wound plot with a single overarching case, it unfolds in a series of smaller unrelated mysteries, making it feel more like a collection of vignettes than a traditional whodunit.