THOMAS BURKE (1886 – 1945) was a British author. He was born in Eltham, London (back then still part of Kent). 
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. 

  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.’ —