Pioneer Press: Rest in peace Shad Rafferty, you big-hearted Irishman, saloon owner and amateur detective

“Writers have a compulsion to keep at it,” he says. “Our imaginations and skills remain at a level I can sustain, at least for a while yet anyway.”

The ninth and final Minnesota mystery, in which Shadwell Rafferty, with the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, may have solved his own murder

Yes, the end has come for Larry Millett’s nine-book Sherlock Holmes in Minnesota mystery series, during which the great detective and Watson solved crimes from Hinckley to a village near Rochester and a farm in the western part of the state. They were often helped by their friend Shadwell Rafferty, who owned a saloon in the elegant Ryan Hotel with his African American partner Thomas “Wash” Washington.

“I decided I’d done as much as I can with Holmes,”  Millett said in an interview from his home in St. Paul’s 1871 Burbank Flats, the oldest row houses in St. Paul.

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Although Millett has ended the Holmes series and put Rafferty to rest for the time being, he’s got a full bag of ideas for books.

“Writers have a compulsion to keep at it,” he says. “Our imaginations and skills remain at a level I can sustain, at least for a while yet anyway.”

Read the full article and learn more about Rafferty's Last Case at Pioneer Press.