The Curse of Capistrano, The Mark of Zorro
By Johnston McCulley
AGAIN, THE SHEET of rain beat against the roof of red Spanish tile, and the wind shrieked like a soul in torment, and smoke puffed from the big fireplace as the sparks were showered over the hard dirt floor.
“Tis a night for evil deeds!” declared Sergeant Pedro Gonzales, stretching his great feet in their loose boots toward the roaring fire and grasping the hilt of his sword in one hand and a mug filled with thin wine in the other. “Devils howl in the wind, and demons are in the raindrops! This an evil night, indeed—eh, senor?”
“It is!” The fat landlord agreed hastily; and he made haste, also, to fill the wine mug again, for Sergeant Pedro Gonzales had a temper that was terrible when aroused, as it always was when wine was not forthcoming.
“An evil night,” the big sergeant repeated and drained the mug without stopping to draw breath, a feat that had attracted considerable attention in its time and had gained the sergeant a certain amount of notoriety up and down El Camino Real, as they called the highway that connected the missions in one long chain.
Gonzales sprawled closer to the fire and cared not that other men thus were robbed of some of its warmth. Sergeant Pedro Gonzales often had expressed his belief that a man should look out for his comfort before considering others; and being of great size and strength, and having much skill with the blade, he found few who dared to declare that they believed otherwise.
Outside the wind shrieked, and the rain dashed against the ground in a solid sheet. It was a typical February storm for southern California. At the missions, the frailes had cared for the stock and had closed the buildings for the night. At every great hacienda, big fires were burning in the houses. The timid natives kept to their little adobe huts, glad for shelter.
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Johnston McCulley
John William Johnston McCulley (February 2, 1883 – November 23, 1958) was an American writer of hundreds of stories, fifty novels, and numerous screenplays for film and television, and the creator of the character Zorro.
Biography
Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and raised in Chillicothe, Illinois, McCulley graduated from Chillicothe Township High School in 1901. He started as a police reporter for The Police Gazette and served as an Army public affairs officer during World War I. An amateur history buff, he went on to a career in pulp magazines and screenplays, often using a Southern California backdrop for his stories.
Many of his novels and stories were written under the pseudonyms Harrington Strong, Raley Brien, George Drayne, Monica Morton, Rowena Raley, Frederic Phelps, Walter Pierson, and John Mack Stone, among others.
Aside from Zorro, McCulley created many other pulp characters, including Black Star, The Spider, The Mongoose, and Thubway Tham. Many of McCulley’s characters—The Green Ghost, The Thunderbolt, and The Crimson Clown—were inspirations for the masked heroes that have appeared in popular culture from McCulley’s time to the present day.
Works
The cover of “The Curse of Capistrano”
McCulley’s Zorro character, reminiscent of Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel, was first serialized in the story “The Curse of Capistrano” in 1919 in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly.
Zorro became his most enduring character. The appearance of the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks silent movie The Mark of Zorro, based on the first novel, was the direct cause for McCulley’s reviving what had originally been a one-time hero plot.
The popularity of the character led to three novellas appearing in Argosy: The Further Adventures of Zorro (1922), Zorro Rides Again (1931), and The Sign of Zorro (1941). In between, he wrote many other novels and stories set in early Spanish California which did not have Zorro as the lead character. Republic optioned the character for a serial, Zorro’s Fighting Legion, which was released in 1939 and was well received. Over the coming decade, Republic released three other serials connected in some way with the Zorro character. In 1940, The Mark of Zorro remake starring Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell made the character much more widely known to the public at large, and McCulley decided to bring Zorro back with new stories.
McCulley made an arrangement with the pulp West Magazine to produce a brand new Zorro short story for every issue. The first of these stories appeared in July 1944 and the last one appeared in July 1951, the final issue of the publication. Fifty-three adventures in all were published in the West. An additional story (possibly a story originally written for West which went unpublished when West folded) appeared in Max Brand’s Western Magazine in the May 1954 issue. The final Zorro story appeared in Short Story Magazine in April 1959, after McCulley’s death and after Walt Disney’s Zorro television program starring Guy Williams had become nationally popular.
Johnston McCulley
