Larry Millett | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1947 (age 75–76) Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Occupation | Journalist, author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago, St. John's University |
| Subject | Crime fiction (Sherlock Holmes), history of Minnesota, architectural history |
| Notable works | Lost Twin Cities, Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon and sequels |
| Website | |
| larrymillett.com | |
Larry Millett (born 1947 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American journalist and author. He is the former (retired 2002) architectural critic for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a daily newspaper in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the author of several books on the history of architecture in Minnesota. He has also written a series of Sherlock Holmes mysteries set in the United States and Minnesota in the 1890s. The books feature the character Shadwell Rafferty, who assists Holmes in his American investigations.
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The Donaldson House: A look inside one of Minnesota's grand homes
Transcription
[ music ] [ Larry Millett ] Hi, I'm Larry Millett, author of Minnesota's Own, Preserving Our Grand Homes. I'm in front of the Lawrence S. Donaldson house in Minneapolis today. Let's go inside and meet my partner on the project, photographer Matt Schmitt. [ Matt Schmitt ] This was a marvelous house to walk into. Larry and I came in to scout it and you just walked into the front door and you know this would be one of the 22 homes. I thought we need to be able to see that there's a living off of the entrance way, the reception area, and I wanted to show some of the glass that was in the entry also, it's beautiful. The quarter sawn oak is gorgeous, wainscoting and everything and it's just a room that needed to be photographed onto it's own. [ music ] [ Larry Millett ] This is the dining room of the Donaldson house and it's one of the most interesting rooms in the house because it's sort of the most Renaissance Revival in style, maybe the most formal room. The dome ceiling is interesting. When the present owner bough the house it had been painted white and he actually restored it with 9 carat gold leaf. One of the other features of this room are the murals that were painted by a man named Alfons Baumgart. [ music ] [ Larry Millett ] We're now in the living room of the Donaldson house, kind of Renaissance Revival type elements to it, including the fire place behind me which is Minnesota travertine stone from Mankato area. You also have in this room a beautiful window. When Mark Perrin bought the house he had these panels remade by Century Studios in Minneapolis as duplicates of the original Tiffany. [ music ] [ Larry Millett ] This is the sun-room of the Donaldson house. This entire room was decorated and out fitted by John Bradstreet who was a famous decorator, interior designer in Minneapolis. He designed, his firm designed the transom panels above the windows, the carved panels above the fire place and also behind me. These are all done with a Japanese technique which involves fuming cypress wood, this is all cypress wood, and it's fumed and then that brings out the deeper color and pattern of the wood. Mark Perrin was able to reacquire these 11 transom screens. They had been removed in 1978 but were never sold, so Perrin went to the people who had sold the items in 1978 and they still had some of them and he bought all total, I guess about 30 items back to bring back to the house to restore it. [ music ]
Education
Millett attended St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1969. He went on to Chicago, Illinois, where he obtained an English master's degree in 1970 from the University of Chicago.
Career
Millett worked at the Pioneer Press from 1972 until 1984 when he had an opportunity to study architecture at the University of Michigan. When he returned to St. Paul in 1985, he became the newspaper's first architecture critic. He has written articles for several historical and architectural magazines in the Midwest, mostly focusing on works by Prairie School architects such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Millett's Lost Twin Cities is probably the best known of his works in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region largely because KTCA, a local public television station, created a video documentary by the same name which covered a few of the buildings in the book. The video was narrated by Dave Moore, a noted area TV journalist, and is often replayed when the station is running a pledge drive. In 2014, Millet was interviewed by Peter Shea for the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. He has also been interviewed twice on the Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series.
External links
- Interview with Peter Shea at University of Minnesota, 2014 [1]
Bibliography
Nonfiction
- The Curve of the Arch: The Story of Louis Sullivan's Owatonna Bank (1985) ISBN 0-87351-181-6 & ISBN 0-87351-182-4
- Lost Twin Cities (1992) ISBN 0-87351-273-1
- Twin Cities Then and Now (1996) ISBN 0-87351-326-6 & ISBN 0-87351-327-4
- National Register of Historic Places in Minnesota (foreword, 2003) ISBN 0-87351-448-3
- Strange Days, Dangerous Nights: Photos from the Speed Graphic Era (2004) ISBN 0-87351-504-8
- AIA Guide to the Twin Cities: The Essential Source on the Architecture of Minneapolis and St. Paul (Paperback) (2007) ISBN 0-87351-540-4
- Murder Has a Public Face (2008)
- AIA Guide to Downtown Minneapolis (2010) ISBN 0873517202
- Once There Were Castles: Lost Mansions and Estates of the Twin Cities (2011)
- Minnesota's Own (2014)
Fiction
Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota
- Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (1996) ISBN 0-670-87039-0
- Sherlock Holmes and the Ice Palace Murders (1998) ISBN 0-670-87944-4 & ISBN 0-14-028089-8
- Sherlock Holmes and the Rune Stone Mystery (1999) ISBN 0-670-88821-4 & ISBN 0-14-029645-X
- Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Alliance (2001)
- The Disappearance of Sherlock Holmes (2002) ISBN 0-14-200340-9
- "The Mystery of the Jeweled Cross" (short story, 2002) ISBN 1-879832-40-2 & ISBN 1-879832-38-0
- "The Brewer's Son" (short story, 2006)
- The Magic Bullet: A Locked Room Mystery Featuring Shadwell Rafferty and Sherlock Holmes (2011) ISBN 0-8166-7480-9
- Strongwood: A Crime Dossier (2014) ISBN 0-8166-9093-6
- Sherlock Holmes and the Eisendorf Enigma (2017)
Other works
- Pineland Serenade (2020)
External links
- Author's website
- Larry Millett talks about Twin Cities Then and Now with David Wiggins; also discusses his first mystery book with Bruce Southworth, Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #378 (1997): [https://reflections.mndigital.org/catalog/p16022coll38:74#/kaltura_video]
- Larry Millett talks about Lost Twin Cities with Steve Benson, Northern Lights Minnesota Author Interview TV Series #329 (1995): [https://reflections.mndigital.org/catalog/p16022coll38:58#/kaltura_video]
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This page was last edited on 31 October 2023, at 03:33