Thomas Burke (1886-1945) was a British author. He was born in Eltham, London. His first work, Limehouse Nights is a 1916 short story collection by the British writer Thomas Burke. The stories are set in and around the Chinatown that was then centred on Limehouse in the East End of London. It was a popular success and features several of Burke's best-known stories such as The Chink and the Child and Beryl and the Croucher. Burke's writing blends several styles to create a dramatic portrait of London. The Chink and the Child was turned into the 1919 film Broken Blossoms directed by D.W. Griffith and its 1936 remake. Beryl and the Croucher was filmed in 1949 as No Way Back set in the contemporary East End as part of the Spiv cycle of films made in the years following the Second World War. "You have not read a paragraph of Thomas Burke's 'Limehouse Nights' before you realize that you are in the presence of a master tale teller. For here is a man whose qualities of greatness are so apparent that it takes not the least discernment to discover them . . . Robert Louis Stevenson, could he have read these pellucid pages, would have reveled in them; Lafcadio Hearn, recognizing signs of his own exotic influence, perhaps, would have loved every line; O. Henry, seeing his own work in some ways resembled and in more surpassed, would have respected him as a master." --The Brooklyn Eagle "One of the most frankly and brutally realistic books that has appeared in our tongue in a long time. But Burke has cast a glamour over his pages that prevents his stories from being merely studies in the sordid and the morbid. Somehow he makes you feel that he has viewed life with pity and tenderness and loving comprehension." -- Bookman