Horubu is a cruel enforcer, described as “bullet-headed,” with “elephantine shoulders” and “ham-shaped fists,” under the employ of Dr. Teroni Tsarka, a criminal mastermind who steals a valuable cache of pure radium which he uses to blind and then blackmail the well-to-do of London society. Despite the undefinable surname, Horubu is portrayed as Japanese ex-military with a penchant for cigars and spilling English blood, saying, after running a car over 18 Londoners, “Some cars have a knack of killing men on their own account. The tumbril I drove at them coughed like a tiger when it caught a man on the run. Once a car has tasted blood… I tell you I could not stop that old Manchurian car from grinding down the pale fat men who had assailed me.” Not the most loyal of henchmen, either, with a treacherous turn at the end of Albert Dorrington’s The Radium Terrors. The novel employs racist stereotypes and verbiage to describe its characters of Asian and Jewish descent, including Tsarka as a “Yellow Peril” villain reminiscent of Fu Manchu.
Description Horubu is a cruel enforcer, described as “bullet-headed,” with “elephantine shoulders” and “ham-shaped fists,” under the employ of Dr. Teroni Tsarka, a criminal mastermind who steals a valuable cache of pure radium which he uses to blind and then blackmail the well-to-do of London society. Despite the undefinable surname, Horubu is portrayed as Japanese ex-military with a penchant for cigars and spilling English blood, saying, after running a car over 18 Londoners, “Some cars have a knack of killing men on their own account. The tumbril I drove at them coughed like a tiger when it caught a man on the run. Once a car has tasted blood… I tell you I could not stop that old Manchurian car from grinding down the pale fat men who had assailed me.” Not the most loyal of henchmen, either, with a treacherous turn at the end of Albert Dorrington’s The Radium Terrors. The novel employs racist stereotypes and verbiage to describe its characters of Asian and Jewish descent, including Tsarka as a “Yellow Peril” villain reminiscent of Fu Manchu.
