The book by Thomas Burke called More Limehouse Nights was published in England under the title of Whispering Windows. At the time of its publication, Mr. Burke wrote the following:

The most disconcerting question that an author can be asked, and often is asked, is: "Why did you write that book?" The questioners do not want an answer to that immediate question; but to the implied question: "Why don't you write some other kind of book?" To either question there is but one answer: BECAUSE.

Every writer is thus challenged. The writer of comic stories is asked why he doesn't write something really serious. The novelist is asked why he doesn't write short stories, and the short-story writer is asked why he doesn't write a novel. To me people say, impatiently: "Why don't you write happy stories about ordinary people?" And the only answer I can give them is: "Because I can't. I present life as I see it."

I am an ordinary man, but I don't understand ordinary men. I am at a loss with them. But with the people of whom I write I have a fellow-feeling. I know them and their sorrows and their thwarted strivings and I understand their aberrations. I cannot see the romance of the merchant or the glamour of the duke's daughter. They do not permit themselves to be seized and driven by passion and imagination. Instead they are driven by fear, which they have misnamed Common-sense. These people thwart themselves, while my people are thwarted by malign circumstance.

Often I have taken other men to the dire districts about which I write, and they have remained unmoved; they have seen, in their phrase, nothing to get excited about. Well, one cannot help that kind of person. One cannot give understanding to the man who regards the flogging of children as a joke, or to whom a broken love-story is, in low life, a theme for smoking-room anecdotes.

Wherever there are human creatures there are beauty and courage and sacrifice. The stories in Whispering Windows deal with human creatures, thieves, drunkards, prostitutes, each of whom is striving for happiness in his or her way, and missing it, as most of us do. Each has hidden away some fine streak of character, some mark below which he will not go. And—they are alive. They have met life in its ugliest phases, and fought it.

My answer, then, to the charge of writing 'loathsome' stories, is that these things happen. To those who say that cruelty and degradation are not fit subjects for fiction, I say that all twists and phases of the human heart are fit subjects for fiction.

The entertainment of hundreds of thousands with "healthy" literature is a great and worthy office; but the author can only give out what is in him. If I write of wretched and strange things, it is because these move me most. Happiness needs no understanding; but these darker things—they are kept too much from sensitive eyes and polite ears; and so are too harshly judged upon the world's report. I am no reformer; I have never "studied" people; and I have no "purpose," unless it be illumination.

What we all need today is illumination; for only through full knowledge can we come to truth—and understanding.

Burke's new book, The London Spy, is described by the author as "a book of town travels." Some of the subjects are London street characters, cab shelters, coffee stalls and street entertainers. The range is very wide, for there is a chapter called "In the Streets of Rich Men," which deals with Pall Mall and Piccadilly, as well as a study of a waterside colony, including the results of a first pipe of opium ("In the Streets of Cyprus"). Mr. Burke tells a good deal about the film world of Soho and is able to give an intimate sketch of Chaplin. Perhaps the most charming of the titles in the book is the chapter called "In the Street of Beautiful Children". This is a study of a street in Stepney, with observations on orphanages and reformatories and "their oppressions of the children of the poor."