Although he wrote more than forty books and was praised by critics as diverse as H. G. Wells, David Garnett, and Nikolaus Pevsner, Thomas Burke is today virtually forgotten. This neglect is not entirely undeserved, for Burke was highly uneven as a writer. He was frequently repetitive and wrote too much that is sentimental, melodramatic, and sensationalistic. Nevertheless, Burke was capable of telling an intelligent, original, insightful story, and it is unfortunate that the book for which he received the most publicity--the short-story collection Limehouse Nights: Tales of Chinatown (1916)--does not represent his best work, the majority of which has never been reprinted. Furthermore, Burke deserves recognition as one of the first English writers to portray Asians as individuals rather than as stereotypes, and he was often surprisingly sympathetic toward women's sexuality; he is perhaps the first writer of note to have stories in which the primary characters...