Jack Brown in China: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang, 1906

Jack Brown in China: A Story of the Russo-Japanese War by Herbert Strang (also published as Brown of Moukden), 1933 is a Young Adult book if its time – so fairly jingoistic and usually about fairly recent events – ‘imperial fiction’ as it’s known – and with a plucky Brit at the centre. It’s on Gutenberg here if you fancy it. And the story is somewhat intriguing – set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Ivan Ivanovitch to his Russian acquaintances) Brown is an Englishman living in Moukden (Mukden aka Shenyang). Jack becomes entangled in the unfair fate of his Chinese friend, Wang Shih, wrongfully punished by a corrupt judge. Some of the descriptions of the war-torn landscape are fairly good and the opening chapters contain some descriptive detail of early 1900s Shenyang (though how accurate this is remains debatable as neither author ever visited to my knowledge).

This book was a return to the Russo-Japanese War for Strang who had previously written, just the year before, Kobo: A story of the Russo-Japanese War (1905). Herbert Strang was a pseudonym used by George Herbert Ely (1866–1958) and Charles James L’Estrange (1867–1947), co-editors in the Juveniles Department of Oxford University Press from 1907 until 1939, and the authors of several dozen adventure stories for boys and the Little Stories of Great Lives series (about a dozen titles – Nelson, Drake, Napoleon etc)…