Thomas Burke 
Limehouse Nights 

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.’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.’Not pour les jeunes, these heartrending stories of London’s Chinatown; but for the stalwart, reader they are full of cleansing and noble pity and terror. In those Christ-forgotten purlieus of fog and filth and booze, in the lowest sediments of brutality and vice, he has found stories that set the soul quivering. . . . If you dare to face the human heart as it really is, do not miss ‘Limehouse Nights.” — C.M.D. in the Boston Transcript.These are tales of passionate but unholy lives, of swift but cunning vengeances, sad tales of human frailties and weaknesses, but told with remarkable literary power and craftmanship.’ — The Detroit Free Press.’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.