Larry Millett’s new book explores a murder at St. Anthony Falls and another solved by Oscar Wilde

It is no coincidence that Larry Millett lives in what he believes is the oldest rowhouse in Minnesota.

The St. Paul novelist and journalist, who dates his house to 1871 and whose new book is “Mysterious Tales of Old Minneapolis,” likes old stuff.

“Being a history guy, I like living in a historic neighborhood,” said Millett, a former reporter at St. Paul’s Pioneer Press who also wrote the “Lost Twin Cities” column for the Star Tribune and has written fiction and nonfiction that incorporates local history. His books include “Metropolitan Dreams,” as well as “Mysterious Tales of Old St. Paul” and mysteries featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Many of Millett’s interests come together in “Mysterious Tales.” The book collects three novellas in which amateur sleuths — a wealthy woman named Sophie Westerly, her daughter-in-law Annie Nichols and a young Oscar Wilde, a decade before he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest” — solve three separate crimes.

Like much of Millett’s fiction, “A Wilde Night at the Nicollet House,” is based in historical fact. There really was a downtown hotel called the Nicollet House, although the murder solved by Wilde and a house detective named Robert “Dobsy” McGuire is invented. Wilde really did go on a lecture tour that brought him to Minneapolis and St. Paul in 1882. And the former Academy of Music really did host Wilde.

“He gave the St. Patrick’s Day address in St. Paul. I’d have loved to have heard that,“ said Millett. ”It was a big national tour. I think he was one of the first people who was a celebrity for being a celebrity, the Kim Kardashian of his day. He hadn’t done a great deal of significant work yet.”

Much of the fun of the book comes from the range of reactions to Wilde’s outlandish dress and behavior, ranging from toughs who hate him on sight to bemused Dobsy, who appreciates his insights.

The other Victorian-era novellas in “Mysterious” are “Murder at the Falls,” in which a flour mill owner’s corpse is discovered near St. Anthony Falls, and “The Death Committee,” in which a lawyer’s will instructs three people to investigate what he believes was his murder.

“Falls” has strong romantic elements and “Death Committee” is an out-and-out whodunit. One of the fun things about writing three novellas, said Millett, is the opportunity to do a number of different things within one book. The new book also highlights that residents of the Twin Cities have always been engaged in low-key feuding about which is the superior twin (near the end of the “Wilde” tale, the title character girds his loins for the “exhausting” journey from Minneapolis to St. Paul).

Having grown up in north Minneapolis but now living near downtown St. Paul, Millett has been gathering evidence his whole life. He prefers his home of the last five decades.

“When I started at the Pioneer Press in 1972, I think I had been to downtown St. Paul two or three times in my whole life. My parents didn’t have a car,” said Millett, who recalls that it could be an hour-long trip from north Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul in the days before the freeway connected the cities. “I’d been there for high school basketball tournaments but I knew nothing about St. Paul when I came for the interview. It seemed so exotic.”

He’s heard all of the generalizations about the twins but said, “The one truth I do believe is that St. Paul is a big small town and Minneapolis is a small big city.”

“I’m very much a locavore, I guess,“ said Millett. ”I probably would have sold more books if I moved out to other locales but I wanted to keep things in Minnesota.”

So it’s no surprise that research for his next book, a history of St. Paul’s James J. Hill House, will keep him right at home.

Mysterious Tales of Old Minneapolis

By: Larry Millett.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 282 pages.