Meet Zenith!

From the JJ Nevins site.

Zenith the Albino, in case you don't know, is one of many enemies of Sexton Blake. This site aims to provide some information about him. (The images above and below, by the way, are taken from Savoy Books' site on Zenith, and are copyrighted by them.)

Zenith, as I said, is an enemy of Sexton Blake. If you aren't familiar with Blake, you should really go my page on him (the link is given right above) to familiarize yourself with Blake and provide the context for the following. If you are familiar with Blake, well, go to the page anyhow, you might learn something.

Now then. Zenith the Albino was not Blake's arch-enemy, Blake didn't really have one of those, having too many recurring enemies for any one of them to be supreme, but Zenith is the best- and most fondly remembered of all of Blake's enemies. Zenith was created by "Anthony Skene," aka George Norman Phillips, and debuted in "A Duel to the Death," Union Jack #837, 21 November 1919. Phillips, by his own account, was inspired to create Zenith in this way:

In 1913, I encountered, in the West End, a true albino, a man of about fifty-five. He was a slovenly fellow: fingers stained with tobacco, clothes soiled by dropped food. Yet he was dressed expensively, and had about him a look of adequacy. I should have forgotten him in a day or so; but when, an hour afterwards and five miles away, I sat down to have my lunch, he walked in to the restaurant and sat himself within a few feet of me.

This coincidence made an impression upon my mind, and when I needed a central figure not quite so banal as Blake for the Union Jack series, I re-created this albino fellow 'moulded nearer to the heart's desire.'

From this encounter came the immortal Zenith. Jack Adrian, in the Sexton Blake Wins anthology, describes Zenith nicely: snow-white hair, leprous skin, pink-irised eyes; his opium-soaked cigarettes, ivory-headed swordstick, melancholy disposition (in this, not unlike his creator), and the bizarre habit (considering he was an eternal fugitive from the police) of wearing, even in broad daylight, immaculate evening dress.

To quote from the text and the jacket copy of Phillips' 1936 novel, Monsieur Zenith:
'Zenith's crimson-irised eyes were reflective. He stood there long of leg and broad of shoulder, immaculately dressed, groomed to perfection, cold as an icicle; and dangerous; transcendently dangerous.'
Monsieur Zenith is an albino. Craving excitement because it brings forgetfulness; thrust into crime by his abnormality, by his illimitable egotism, by the caprice of his recalcitrant nature, he finds himself involved in the quest for a mysterious something on the finding of which life--and more than life--depends.

Indifferent to gratitude or reward, asserting--and, perhaps, believing--that he seeks only the final diversion of the damned, to dice with death; threatened on the one hand by the police, and, on the other, by political chicanery, this strange creature crashes through.

Monsieur Zenith is the strangest, most bizarre, character ever devised in thriller fiction.

Zenith was a sinister individual of the "gentleman crook" variety, elegant, sophisticated, and quite lethal. He was, as mentioned, an albino, with "snowy white hair" and "rabbit pink eyes." His background was variously described as being Romanian nobility and a famous old English family, but more often it was left vague (see below), as perhaps was best. Zenith had a first-rate education, regardless of what country he came from, was a top violinist and an Olympic-level fencer, but, alas, his background and attainments did not stop him from turning bad. He smoked prodigious amounts of opium, used his own inventions for criminal ends (his infra-red binoculars were a threat to all of London's wealth, and his special drill, made of a steel unknown to science, could "perforate a hardened steel safe as a a gimlet will perforate a cardboard box"), used his sword-cane for lethal ends, and in general left a trail of broken minds, bodies, and fortunes behind him. Zenith was the admitted model for Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné, and had a definite style to him; he always referred to Blake as "dear detective" and uttered one of the best villainous lines of all time: while speaking to the rude henchman of another villain Zenith said, "I would treat you as you deserve, but the blood would get on my cuffs."

Better still, I've found "The Box of Ho Sen," from Detective Weekly #8, 15 April 1933, a prime example of Zenith (and Phillips) at the top of his game. I'm going to push the Fair Use doctrine as far as it will go and provide as many good passages as I can from the story, so you can see why Zenith is just too cool for words.