Mycroft & Moran Mycroft & Moran Mycroft & Moran was an imprint of Arkham House publishers and was created in Sauk City, Wisconsin in 1945. The imprint was created to publish weird detective stories and the Solar Pons stories by August Derleth. Arkham retired the imprint in 1982, but has recently allowed it to be revived by another small press publisher. The name of the Mycroft & Moran imprint was derived from two characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Mycroft is derived from the name of Sherlock Holmes' brother, Mycroft Holmes. Moran refers to Colonel Sebastian Moran, "the second most dangerous man in
Gentleman detective English country house. This archetype of British detective contrasts with the more "hardboiled" counterpart in American crime fiction. Gentlemen detectives appeared early in modern detective fiction, which began in the late 19th century. C. Auguste Dupin, created by Edgar Allan Poe, is widely considered to be the first fictional detective in English literature. He appeared in three short stories written in the 1840s: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" (1842) and "The Purloined Letter" (1844). Poe created Dupin before the word "detective" had been coined, but began many common elements of detective fiction: Dupin