H. B. (Henry Burgess) Drake

Henry Burgess Drake was a British teacher, Orientalist, and author who was born in Tsien Ping, Shansi, China, in 1894. Reference sources agree that he spent his childhood in Britain, served during World War I, and later built a writing career alongside his academic interests.

His fiction often leaned toward fantasy, ghostly suspense, and the occult. Modern genre references especially single out The Remedy (1925), later published as The Shadowy Thing, as the work he is chiefly remembered for today. He also wrote under the name Burgess Drake; one of his better-known later books was Chinese White (1950), a novel set in China during World War II.

That mix of lived experience, scholarly interest in Asia, and a taste for the uncanny gives his work a distinctive flavor. Though not widely known now, he still has a place in reference works on speculative and supernatural fiction, where he is remembered as a writer whose strange tales left a lingering impression.