Thomas Burke (Author)

Thomas Burke (* November 1886 in Eltham near London ; † September 22, 1945 in London) was a British author of horror literature .

Thomas Burke, who was one of the most famous English short story writers of the 1900s / 1910s, wrote mainly scary stories from London's Chinatown and the East Dock Ends , where he grew up.

His first successful short story was Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories set in the poor Limehouse district. Many of his books are narrated by the Chinese character Quong Lee.

In 1919, John Penn wrote the poem from Limehouse Nights The Lamplit Hour in the USA into a piece of music. In the same year, director DW Griffith made the story The Chink and the Child from this collection the basis for the script for his film Broken Blossoms .

Thomas Burke is remembered primarily for the story The Hands of Mr. Ottermole (from Burke's collection The Pleasantries of Old Quong , 1931), which a jury of crime fiction authors had selected as the best crime story of all time. It was selected in 1957 for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television series and directed by Robert Stevens . The television film exuded the same damp and cold mood as Alfred Hitchcock's own silent film classic The Lodger .

Bibliography of his stories

• The Bloomsbury Wonder . London: Mandrake Press, 1929.
• Broken Blossoms: a selection of stories from Limehouse Nights. London, 1920.
• Dark Nights . London: Herbert Jenkins, [1944]. Includes novelette The Bloomsbury Wonder .
• East of Mansion House . London: Cassell, 1928 New York: Doran, 1926.
• The Flower of Life . Boston: Little, Brown, 1931; Constable, 1929.
• The Golden Gong and Other Night-Pieces . Ed. Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Afterword reminiscence by Grant Richards. Ashcroft: Ash_Tree Press, 2001.
• Go lovely rose . Brooklyn, NY: Sesphra Library, 1931.
• Limehouse Nights . London: Grant Richards, 1917.
• More Limehouse Nights . New York: George H. Doran, 1921.
• Night Pieces: Eighteen Tales . London: Constable, 1935.
• The Pleasantries of Old Quong . London: Constable, 1931.
• The Sun in Splendor . London: Constable, 1927. New York: George H. Doran, 1926.
• Twinkletoes: a Tale of Limehouse . New York: Robert M. McBride, 1918.
• Whispering Windows: Tales of the Waterside . London: Grant Richards, 1921.
• The Wind and the Rain: A Book of Confessions . London: Thornton Butterworth, 1924. New York: Doran, 1924.
• The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse . London: Allen & Unwin, 1920. New York: Holt, 1920.

Secondary literature

• R. Thurston Hopkins, In the Footsteps of Thomas Burke , Chapter XIII of London Pilgrimages (London: Brentano's, 1928), pp. 193-210.
• Barry Milligan, Pleasures and Pains: Opium and the Orient in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Charlottesville & London: UP of Virginia, 1995).
• George A. Wade, The Cockney John Chinaman , The English Illustrated Magazine (July 1900): 301-07.
• Anne Witchard, Aspects of Literary Limehouse: Thomas Burke and the 'Glamorous Shame of Chinatown , Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London , 2, 2 (September 2004): 7 pp. http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/witchard.html ( Memento from March 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive )
• Thomas Burke, the 'Laureate of Limehouse': A New Biographical Outline , English Literature in Transition , 48, 2 (January 2005):
• Anne Veronica Witchard: Thomas Burke's dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse nights and the queer spell of Chinatown , Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7546-5864-1