Larry Millett

St. Paul, Minnesota. October 1, 1917. High above the city, a renowned local financier named Artemis Dodge lies facedown on the floor of his armored penthouse sanctuary, a single bullet hole in his head. Thirty stories up, in the city's tallest building, and not a shred of evidence or sign pointing to anyone having broken into the wealthy man's fortress. It is -- to all appearances -- an impossible crime. Enter Shadwell Rafferty: Irishman, St. Paul saloonkeeper, sometime detective, and old friend of the celebrated sleuth Sherlock Holmes. Summoned by Louis B. Hill -- son of railroad magnate James J. Hill -- to investigate, Rafferty descends into a world dominated by greedy tycoons and awash in political intrigue and wartime fearmongering. Suspects lurk in every corner of the city -- including Dodge's beautiful young widow, his slippery assistant, and a shadowy anarchist -- and Rafferty pursues them from the streets of Ramsey Hill and the rooms of the Ryan Hotel to the labyrinthine caves under the Schmidt brewery. Matching wits with his foes at the police department and his unsavory rival, the St. Paul detective Mordecai Jones, Rafferty knows that in order to bring a killer to justice he must first unravel the riddle of a single bullet fired in a locked room, three hundred feet above the streets of St. Paul. --

Sherlock Holmes rides again in this delightful mystery, based on another newly discovered manuscript. The year is 1896, and St. Paul's magnificent Winter Carnival is underway when Holmes and Watson are summoned by the city's most powerful man, railroad magnate James J. Hill. It seems a wealthy young man has disappeared on the eve of his wedding, and his fiancee has suspiciously discarded her wedding dress. After a grisly discovery in the carnival's ice palace leads to a flurry of clues, Holmes is on the case. His pursuit of the murderer takes him through the highest echelons of St. Paul society, over the frozen Mississippi River, and into cahoots with one Shadwell Rafferty, a gregarious saloonkeeper and part-time private investigator whose quick wit and fast thinking make him a formidable rival and an invaluable ally. A splendid sequel to Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon, and written in the same deliciously authentic Sherlockian style, this latest adventure offers an exhilarating portrait of America on the verge of a new century as well as an intriguing mystery that is nothing short of truly chilling. (back cover)

"For three decades, starting in the 1930s and ending in the 1950s, the Speed Graphic camera was synonymous with photojournalism. Championed by acclaimed photographers like Arthur Fellig (a.k.a. Weegee), the Speed Graphic was lightweight and incredibly durable - and it could produce stunning images. Press photographers of the day created a new visual style that was as blunt, powerful, and immediate as a left hook." "Driven by the desire to fill newspaper pages with sensational images, press photographers shot everything, day and night: automobile accidents, fires, murders, all the cop news that fought for a hot spot on the Front Page. They also covered uncounted numbers of civic affairs - pictures called "grip-and-grins" in the trade: school events, sports, celebrities, oddities both of nature and humanity." "Veteran journalist and mystery writer Larry Millett has unearthed over 200 such images from the archives of the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the St. Paul Dispatch. He tells the stories behind the pictures and offers brief biographies of some of these pioneering photographers."--BOOK JACKET.

"From Duluth to Bemidji, Red Wing to the Twin Cities, writer Larry Millett and photographer Matt Schmitt highlight Minnesota homes designed by architects such as Edwin Lundie, Frank Lloyd Wright, and William Purcell and George Elmslie and with sumptuous ornamentation by local craftspeople including interior decorator John Bradstreet and woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer. Minnesota's Own welcomes readers into twenty-two of these homes through over two hundred color photographs and Millett's captivating stories of their construction, original owners, and restorations"--

"On December 18, 1961, wrecking trucks rumbled through the streets of downtown Minneapolis toward a rendezvous with the past. Their destination was the corner where the Metropolitan Building, for seventy-one years, had towered above its neighbors. But with the city in the midst of its greatest urban renewal project, the Metropolitan was about to come down, a victim of age, politics, and ideology. Lost Twin Cities, made up of images and stories reteived from a largely forgotten past, vividly reconstructs a vanished urban world. Many of the missing buildings are almost beyond recollection, while others remain etched in memory"--Back cover.

Dogged by depression, doubt, and as a trip to the Mayo Clinic has revealed emphysema, 66-year-old Sherlock Holmes is preparing to return to England when he receives a shock: a note slipped under his hotel room door, from a vicious murderer he'd nearly captured in Munich in 1892. The murderer, known as the Monster of Munich, announces that he has relocated to Eisendorf, a tiny village near the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. If Holmes is not what he once was, the same can be said for Eisendorf: once a thriving community founded by German idealists but now a dying town with only forty residents, two of whom have, indeed, died recently under highly mysterious circumstances. Replete with all the gothic richness of Larry Millett's earlier Holmes novels, Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma links events in 1892 Germany with those in small-town Minnesota in 1920 in a double mystery that tests the aging detective s mettle and the reader s nerve as never before. Guided by Eisendorf's peculiar archivist and taunted by the Monster, Holmes finds himself drawn into the town's dark history of violence and secrecy, and into the strange tunnels that underscore the old flour mill where answers, and grievous danger, lie in wait. No longer the cool, flawless logician of times past, Holmes must nonetheless match wits with a fiendish opponent who taunts him right up to a final, explosive confrontation.

In Lost Twin Cities, Larry Millett brought to life the vanished architecture of downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul. Now, in Once There Were Castles, he offers a richly illustrated look at another world of ghosts in our midst: the lost mansions and estates of the Twin Cities. Nobody can say for sure how many lost mansions haunt the Twin Cities, but at least five hundred can be accounted for in public records and archives. In Minneapolis and St. Paul, entire neighborhoods of luxurious homes have disappeared, virtually without a trace. Many grand estates that once spread out over hundreds of acres.

This book is an engaging, startling, and at times heartbreaking look at the dramatic evolution of landscapes in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Larry Millett, author of Lost Twin Cities, explores the changing appearances of Minneapolis and St. Paul from the vantage point of their relatively static streets. Seventy-two historic photographs, taken from the 1880s to the late 1950s, are paired with Jerry Mathiason's elegant new black-and-white photographs to provide superb visual comparisons between then and now. Millett's lively, informative essays examine the often astonishing changes wrought by time and circumstance. Maps and detailed informational graphics provide orientation and identify hundreds of significant buildings and places in the photographs.

Holmes and Shadwell Rafferty confront terrorists as President William McKinley prepares to visit Minneapolis in 1899.