I know the book you're talking about. David Nevin, 1812. It's on my bookshelf, next to a bunch of Harry Turtledove.Covers can also vary from territory to territory, depending on what audience you trying to sell the book to. When Tor did a big historical novel about the War of 1812 decades ago, we put different covers on the American and Canadian paperbacks: a patriotic, red-white-and-blue cover for the American market and more a neutral cover -- featuring an antique map -- for the Canadian market.
I think I'm on my third cover (and back to the first title, after a period where it had the movie title) to the ebook of Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun. (I had it in hardcover back in the day, but I downsized it some years ago.) I was grumpy when it changed to The King's Daughter.
Definitely remember that - I think someone on the psiphi boards alerted DWS to it maybe?
And The Case of the Colonist's Corpse.
There's also another Holmes relative that William S. Baring-Gould proposed: Nero Wolfe, who he speculated was the child of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler. (Wolfe shares a number of traits in common with Mycroft Holmes, so there was a certain logic behind it.)Let's take Sherlock Holmes for a moment. Writers after Doyle have invented a number of family members that aren't in the Canon. There's the much older brother Sherringford (from William S. Baring- Gould), a much younger sister Enola (from Nancy Springer), a completely different younger sister Violet (from Andy Lane), plus his son Raffles (from John Kendrick Bangs), and his daughter Lucy (from Charles Vesey and Anne Elliott). None of these go together, or were ever intended to go together, yet I like imagining that they can and do fit together in various combinations. Just for myself, and only for fun. Enola and Raffles together would be hilarious.
I just reread the book this summer, and you're more or less or correct. In the movie, Moriarty is the man that Holmes' mother had an affair with. In the book,
No. That finale had pretty much nothing to do with anything Doyle ever wrote.
I'm currently in the midst of trying to reacquire my book collection after losing most of it in 2023, and in most cases I'm trying to largely get the exact same editions I had before, so I'm after editions mostly published from the 1970s to the 2020s. Library Thing has been a great help in cataloguing exactly which editions I'm trying to get.
Carole Nelson Douglas retitled several of her earlier Irene Adler novels for reasons I've never understood, After the first book, Good Night, Mr. Holmes, Book 2, Good Morning, Irene, became The Adventuress, Book 3 went from Irene at Large to A Soul of Steel, and Book 4, Irene's Last Waltz, became Another Scandal in Bohemia.
Page-one rewrites. Hmm. I make no secret here of the fact that I grew up on Stratemeyer's The Bobbsey Twins series, and there are two notable "page-one rewrites," namely "Baby May" and "Cherry Corners." The original version of The Bobbsey Twins and Baby May had the Bobbsey family taking in a foundling, and the titular children (two sets of twins, for the uninitiated) locating the mother. Something that would be more than a little bit implausible by the time the books were revised in the 1960, so what did they do? What any book packaging company would do: replace it with The Bobbsey Twins' Adventures with Baby May, in which "Baby May" is now a baby elephant. A baseball-playing baby elephant. Likewise, The Bobbsey Twins at Cherry Corners was a direct sequel to the original "Baby May" book, so obviously they needed a new one, that took almost nothing but the title from the original.
Just a relatively unremarkable TPB. Just a retro-looking detective fiction cover, and retro dyed page edges. What I meant about the USS Cerritos crew Handbook binding being "a thing of beauty" is what I noted elsewhere: they went to the expense of Smyth-sewing the damn thing, and they used a limp cover, like you might find on, say, a locomotive owner's manual -- or a Bible.
My guess is that that was the point!