Thomas Burke

Burke has in fact used the same material to produce different genres of writing—as essays in Nights Town: A London Autobiography, as fictional short stories in Limehouse Nights, as a novel in Twinkletoes, and as poetry in The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse. Though the majority of Burke's writing was concerned with London, and more specifically the East End and the Limehouse district, Burke also published several eclectic and "uncharacteristic" pieces. With Night-Pieces (1935) and Murder at Elstree or Mr. Thurtell and His Gig, Burke tried his hand at horror fiction. In contrast to this, Burke also published The Beauty of England (1933) and The English Inn (1930), which depict England's countryside, and The Outer Circle, which contains a series of ramblings about the London suburbs. In 1901 "The Bellamy Diamonds" was published in Spare Moments "which every week offered a guinea for the best short story sent in" (169).

Burke continued to develop his descriptions of London life throughout his later literary works. He gradually expanded his range with novels such as The Sun in Splendor, which was published in 1926. He also continued to publish essays on the London environment, including pieces such as "The Real East End" and "London in My Times". Burke died in the Homeopathic Hospital in Queens Square, Bloomsbury on 22 September 1945. His short story "The Hands of Ottermole" was later voted the best mystery of all time by critics in 1949.

In 1937, Burke published For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors. Burke's nonfictional account, according to Houlbrook, "offers an ironic—if heavily veiled—indictment of contemporary sexual mores", and again establishes public, rather than private spaces, particularly urinals, as the sites of homosexual desire. By providing a verbal and visual map of London with the locations of urinals clearly marked, Burke "[formalizes] men's knowledge of these sexual possibilities" and "[codifies] their knowledge of the tactics needed to use these sites safely". Burke's work as an urban observer thus allows him to map the public world of London's queer and to reflect upon the extent to which interaction with London's public landmarks engaged homosexual communities in an historical narrative of identity formation.

Any attempt to accurately describe Thomas Burke's life is severely complicated by the many fictionalised accounts of his youth that circulated widely during his lifetime. Burke himself was principally responsible for fabricating and disseminating these autobiographical stories, which he used to bolster his authorial claim to an intimate knowledge of life among the lower-classes. As literary critic Anne Witchard notes, most of what we know about Burke's life is based on works that "purport to be autobiographical [and] yet contain far more invention than truth". For instance, although he grew up in the suburbs, Thomas Burke claims in his autobiographical novel The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions (1924) to have been born and raised in the East End, a lower-working class area of London. Furthermore, in this work he states that while growing up as an orphan in the East End he befriended a Chinese shopkeeper named Quong Lee from whom he learned about Chinese life in London. Burke also told newspaper reporters that he had "sat at the feet of Chinese philosophers who kept opium dens to learn from the lips that could frame only broken English, the secrets, good and evil, of the mysterious East".

Thomas Burke's later nonfictional works, as analysed by Matt Houlbrook in Queer London, examine, if only in an indirect way, London's homosexual communities. In 1922, Burke published The London Spy: A Book of Town Travels, part of which describes the male homosexual relationship as existing within the public spaces of the city: "Only in the misty corners of the thickening streets…can [homosexual couples] attain the solitude they seek…For the young lover…the street is more private than the home."

Griffith called Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919) in 1919 and again in 1936 (Broken Blossoms (1936)).

Reviews of Burke's many other works are more mixed, and always overshadowed by the controversial and successful Limehouse Nights. Twinkletoes, published a year later in 1918, rode on the same wave of approval. More Limehouse Nights in 1921 was also generally well received, but Burke was increasingly criticised for repetition. As critic John Gunther remarked, "[it] may be true that London is big enough to stand nine books about her from one hand. But that hand should be a bigger one than Thomas Burke's". While critical interest in Burke is now typically sparse, when recognised he is still regarded favourably as a Modernist author.

Despite a long list of works, recognition of Burke largely concerns Limehouse Nights, his second book of London stories. Published in 1917, Burke's gritty tales of London's Chinatown ignited immediate controversy. The book was initially banned by circulating libraries, not only on grounds of general immorality, but also for the scandalous interracial relationships portrayed between Chinese men and white women. Set during World War I in a declining British Empire, Limehouse Nights aggravated already present anxieties. As critic Anne Witchard notes, the twentieth century Britain of Burke's lifetime propagated the idea of Yellow perilism, which saw the presence of the Chinese in London as a cause of "degenerative metropolitan blight and imperial and racial decline". In no small part thanks to Burke and his contemporary, Sax Rohmer, what had been a largely unnoticed Chinese immigrant population now found itself under public scrutiny. The culmination of this negative attention was a hysteria in the late 1920s, centred on claims of "the hypnotism of white girls by yellow men". In America, aided by D.W. Griffith's adaptation of "The Chink and the Child," the 1919 silent film Broken Blossoms, Burke's reception was much more positive. Having so closely tied his literature to Limehouse, illuminating an otherwise shadowed community, it is somewhat ironic that Burke's popularity correlated with the decline of Chinese concentration in the district, leaving him all but forgotten today.

His first successful publication was Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories centred on life in the poverty-stricken Limehouse district of London. Many of Burke's books feature the Chinese character Quong Lee as narrator.

In 1915, Burke published Nights in Town: A London Autobiography, which featured his descriptions of working-class London nightlife including the essay, 'A Chinese Night, Limehouse' However, it was not until the publication of Limehouse Nights in 1916 that he obtained any substantial acclaim as an author. This collection of melodramatic short stories, set in a lower-class environment populated by Chinese immigrants, was published in three British periodicals, The English Review, Colour and The New Witness, and received marked attention from literary reviewers. Limehouse Nights helped to earn Burke a reputation as "the laureate of London's Chinatown". Burke's writing also influenced contemporary popular forms of entertainment, such as the nascent film industry. Indeed, D. W. Griffith used the short story "The Chink and the Child" from Limehouse Nights as the basis for his popular silent film Broken Blossoms (1919).

British essayist and novelist Thomas Burke was born in London in 1886. His father died when Thomas was still an infant. He lived on and off with a succession of relatives, and spent four years in an orphanage. After graduating school at age 15 he took a variety of jobs, but his interest was always in writing (he sold his first story at age 16). He worked for a used-book seller and later a literary agency. A publisher saw some of his privately published poems and anthologies and commissioned him to write a book. He wrote a series of sketches about life in London called "Nights in Town". That was followed by a volume of short stories, "Limehouse Nights". That book met with considerable success, and he was afterward commissioned to write by both British and American publishers. He wrote in a variety of forms, including short stories, essays, novels, poems and even penned several songs. Probably his best known work was the short story "The Chink and the Child", which was made into a very successful movie by D. W.