Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
Acknowledgements
CHAPTER 1 - PEDRO, THE BOASTER
CHAPTER 2 - ON THE HEELS OF THE STORM
CHAPTER 3 - SEÑOR ZORRO PAYS A VISIT
CHAPTER 4 - SWORDS CLASH—AND PEDRO EXPLAINS
CHAPTER 5 - A RIDE IN THE MORNING
CHAPTER 6 - DIEGO SEEKS A BRIDE
CHAPTER 7 - A DIFFERENT SORT OF MAN
CHAPTER 8 - DON CARLOS PLAYS A GAME
CHAPTER 9 - THE CLASH OF BLADES
CHAPTER 10 - A HINT AT JEALOUSY
CHAPTER 11 - THREE SUITORS
CHAPTER 12 - A VISIT
CHAPTER 13 - LOVE COMES SWIFTLY
CHAPTER 14 - CAPTAIN RAMÓN WRITES A LETTER
CHAPTER 15 - AT THE PRESIDIO
CHAPTER 16 - THE CHASE THAT FAILED
CHAPTER 17 - SERGEANT GONZALES MEETS A FRIEND
CHAPTER 18 - DON DIEGO RETURNS
CHAPTER 19 - CAPTAIN RAMÓN APOLOGIZES
CHAPTER 20 - DON DIEGO SHOWS INTEREST
CHAPTER 21 - THE WHIPPING
CHAPTER 22 - SWIFT PUNISHMENT
CHAPTER 23 - MORE PUNISHMENT
CHAPTER 24 - AT THE HACIENDA OF DON ALEJANDRO
CHAPTER 25 - A LEAGUE IS FORMED
CHAPTER 26 - AN UNDERSTANDING
CHAPTER 27 - ORDERS FOR ARREST
CHAPTER 28 - THE OUTRAGE
CHAPTER 29 - DON DIEGO FEELS ILL
CHAPTER 30 - THE SIGN OF THE FOX
CHAPTER 31 - THE RESCUE
CHAPTER 32 - CLOSE QUARTERS
CHAPTER 33 - FLIGHT AND PURSUIT
CHAPTER 34 - THE BLOOD OF THE PULIDOS
CHAPTER 35 - THE CLASH OF BLADES AGAIN
CHAPTER 36 - ALL AGAINST THEM
CHAPTER 37 - THE FOX AT BAY
CHAPTER 38 - THE MAN UNMASKED
CHAPTER 39 - “MEAL MUSH AND GOAT’S MILK!”
FOR MORE CLASSIC TALES OF ADVENTURE, LOOK FOR THE
PENGUIN
CLASSICS
THE MARK OF ZORRO
JOHNSTON McCULLEY was born in 1883 in Ottawa, Illinois, and worked as a newspaperman, mainly in New York, while freelancing as a writer of popular fiction for pulp magazines. In 1908, he moved to California and immersed himself in its history. Of his hundreds of stories and fifty novels, by far the most popular and enduring are the four novels and fifty-seven novellas and short stories about Zorro, the daring masked rider and dazzling swordsman who fights against tyranny and oppression in Spanish/Mexican California. McCulley’s other novels include more costume adventures set in Zorro’s California, a number of Westerns, and mysteries with such masked-avenger protagonists as the Green Ghost, the Thunderbolt, the Scarlet Scourge, and the Crimson Clown. He was so prolific that he published some of his fiction under pseudonyms, including George Drayne, Frederic Phelps, Harrington Strong, Raley Brian, and even Rowena Raley. He also wrote screenplays, mainly for low-budget Westerns. He lived long enough to see the Disney televised Zorro become a huge hit and died in November 1958.
ROBERT E. MORSBERGER, PH.D., University of Iowa, is professor emeritus of English at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He served for two years as a visiting professor at the University of Nigeria and was a seasonal ranger/ historian for eight summers with the National Park Service. His ten books include the first book-length study of James Thurber, two volumes on American Screenwriters that he coedited for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Swordplay on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage, and Commonsense Grammar and Style. A Steinbeck specialist, he edited Steinbeck’s screenplay Viva Zapata! for Viking Penguin and has published numerous articles, short stories, and reviews.
KATHARINE M. MORSBERGER, PH.D., University of California, Riverside, has served as director of publications at Pitzer College and has taught at California State University, San Bernardino. An eighteenth-century literature specialist, she has published articles on John Locke; Dryden’s and Pope’s translations of Chaucer; Laurence Sterne and Roland Barthes; and in collaboration with Robert E. Morsberger, a biography, Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic. Both Morsbergers have been fencers and are drama reviewers for the Claremont Courier.
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England The Mark of Zorro first published in the United States of America by Grosset & Dunlap 1924
This edition with an introduction by Robert E. Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger published in Penguin Books 2005
Introduction copyright © Robert E. Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger, 2005 All rights reserved
Originally published in issues of All-Story Weekly magazine.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
McCulley, Johnston, 1883-1958.
The mark of Zorro / Johnston McCulley ; with an mtroduction by Robert E.
Morsberger and Katharine M. Morsberger. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-00736-5
1. Zorro (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Aristocracy (Social class}-Fiction. 3. Spaniards—California—Fiction. 4. Vigilantes—Fiction. 5. California-Fiction, I. Morsberger, Robert Eustis, 1929- II. Morsberger, Katharine M. III. Title. PS3525.A17725M’.52—dc22 2005045903
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Introduction
A black-clad rider, waving a sword, his cape billowing in the wind, his rearing black horse silhouetted against the night sky—Zorro rides again to bring justice to the oppressed, decade after decade, from silent to sound film to radio to television and onward to the Internet. Zorro first saw the light of day—or rather, the dark of night—in 1919 in a five-part serial entitled The Curse of Capistrano, published in the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly. The author, thirty-six-year-old Johnston McCulley, had been a newspaper reporter, a foreign correspondent, a reporter for the Police Gazette, a freelance writer of novels and short stories for the pulps, and, during World War I, a public affairs officer. When he created Zorro, he could have had no idea that he was creating a mythic hero, a legend that was to endure for the better part of a century. Printed on the cheap throwaway paper which gave them their name, inexpensive pulp magazines, with their melodramatic cover illustrations, lured readers of adventure—science fiction, crime, horror, and Westerns. Unless reprinted in book form, pulp magazine fiction had a very brief life, and even the books, usually c
heap reprints like McCulley’s novels, had a very short shelf life. Yet a number of respected authors got their start writing pulp fiction, and from their number emerged two iconic figures of the twentieth century—Tarzan and Zorro.1
Zorro was rescued from oblivion and set on the road to immortality by Douglas Fairbanks, who read the All-Story Weekly episodes of The Curse of Capistrano while en route to Europe on his honeymoon. Deciding to film it as his next movie, retitling it The Mark of Zorro, was a radical change for Fairbanks, who until then had made contemporary comedies, in which he frequently portrayed an athletic playboy. In 1920, Fairbanks virtually invented the swashbuckling film with The Mark of Zorro, transforming his career and setting him on the road to immortality along with Zorro.
Fairbanks made Zorro so popular that when McCulley’s novel was finally published in hardcover in 1924, the author changed its title to The Mark of Zorro and dedicated it to “Douglas Fairbanks, the original Zorro of the screen.” McCulley went on to write a sequel, serialized as The Further Adventures of Zorro, “in which Douglas Fairbanks again plays the hero.” But instead, Fairbanks returned to Zorro in 1925 with Don Q, Son of Zorro, not based upon a McCulley novel but upon Kate and Hesketh Pritchard’s novel Don Q’s Love Story. Fairbanks made Don Q the son of Zorro, whose name is Don Cesar (when disguised in one episode, he calls himself Don Q) and adjusted the script to fit the Fairbanks persona. In the film, Fairbanks also plays the original Zorro, who comes to his son’s rescue at the end.
It was a stroke either of genius or good luck for McCulley to use zorro, the Spanish word for fox. The word has a resonance that has made the name unforgettable and kept it alive for nearly a century. The word for fox in any other language lacks the zest and edge of zorro. As Isabel Allende observes, when Zorro fiction or films are translated into other languages, Zorro remains untranslated; he is always Zorro.2 The idea of the clever fox goes back at least as far as Aesop’s fables and the Odyssey, in which the sorceress Circe plans to turn the wily Odysseus into a fox. To outwit someone is to outfox him. In the opening episode of Disney’s Zorro, when Bernardo warns his master not to openly take on the ruthless dictator Montasario, Don Diego responds, “when you cannot clothe yourself with the skin of a lion, put on that of the fox,” and thus comes up with the idea of Zorro. Sometimes, the masked hero is referred to as Señor Zorro but never as the Zorro; he has become simply and memorably Zorro. It is the sound rather than the meaning of zorro that gives it vitality. The right title is equally significant.3 McCulley’s first title The Curse of Capistrano is catchy but forgettable. It is also misleading, since none of the action takes place in Capistrano, which is a mission stop on the Camino Real, south of Los Angeles, in and around which the novel does take place. Fairbanks, with a sense of what would attract an audience, changed the title to The Mark of Zorro, by which it has been known ever since. All but one of the subsequent film adaptations as well as McCulley’s later Zorro stories have Zorro in the title.
McCulley’s own sequel, republished in 1928 as The Sword of Zorro, is quite different from Fairbanks’s film sequel. In it the governor of California, far from reforming, is enraged that Don Diego Vega and the caballeros of Los Angeles have thwarted his malevolent plans. In revenge, he conspires with Captain Ramón to have a band of pirates raid and ravage the city, kidnapping Lolita Pulido as his personal reward. (Captain Ramón had been killed at the end of the first novel, but McCulley needed him for the sequel and resurrected him, retaining the Z that Zorro carved on his forehead.) “What knaves!” exclaims Barbados, the pirate captain, “I would rather be an honest pirate than a politician any day!”4 When pirates attack on the eve of Don Diego’s wedding, Diego and his friends fight them off and pursue them. Now in his Zorro costume, Diego outdistances his companions, dives off a cliff into the ocean after the ship that is carrying Lolita, and climbs the ship’s anchor chain. He manages to hide on board and communicate with Lolita. Eventually discovered, he single-handedly fights the entire crew, in an episode that McCulley may have designed with Fairbanks in mind. The rest of the novel involves treachery, hair-breadth escapes, and the final rescue.
McCulley went on to write two more Zorro novels, Zorro Rides Again (1931) and The Sign of Zorro (1941), and fifty-seven Zorro novellas and short stories. His last Zorro story, “The Mask of Zorro,” was published posthumously in April 1959, following his death on November 23, 1958.
Several of his other novels are also set in the romanticized California past of Zorro-Captain Fly-by-Night (filmed in 1922 and published in 1926), Black Grandee, The Caballero, Don Peon (billed as “A new novel of Romance and High Adventure in Zorro-Land”), Don Renegade, Senor Vulture, Señor Devil-May-Care, The Devil’s Doubloon, and Señor Avalanche-but none of them achieved Zorro’s enduring mythic legacy.
McCulley was born in Ottawa, Illinois, on February 2, 1883, the same year as Douglas Fairbanks. As a newspaperman, he worked mainly in New York. He began publishing fiction in 1907 and moved to southern California the next year. A self-styled history buff, he researched the time of the early missions to provide a more substantial background for some of his period fiction. In 1944, he shifted from Argosy (as All-Story Weekly had become) to West. In addition to his novels and stories, he collaborated on many low-budget films, mainly for Republic and Monogram, that included Gene Autry’s Rootin’ Tootin’ Rhythm, the Hopalong Cassidy Doomed Caravan, the Cisco Kid movie South of the Rio Grande (1945, with Duncan Renaldo), and a Zorro-type swashbuckler Mark of the Renegade (1951, with Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland).
Besides the novels set in the California of Zorro, McCulley wrote dozens of Westerns and nineteen mystery novels. The most popular of the mysteries, recently reprinted, was The Black Star (1924), featuring a masked criminal mastermind. At the scene of his crimes, he pastes black stars, just as Zorro leaves a Z. Though the ingenious Black Star is finally outwitted and captured, McCulley brought him back in three sequels. Like Don Diego Vega, the protagonists of many of these novels have a dual identity. The back cover of the Wildside Press’s reissue of The Black Star says that McCulley “virtually invented the masked-avenger genre with such characters as the Green Ghost, the Thunderbolt, and the Crimson Clown.”
Thus McCulley set the precedent for the masked and/or dual identity villains and crime-fighting heroes of adventure comics. Zorro was the first caped crusader, and Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, acknowledges his indebtedness. Growing up in a tough part of the Bronx, Kane proposed that the gang he belonged to call themselves “The Crusading Zorros.” They wore black masks and tried to swashbuckle around the neighborhood. When he created Batman in 1939, Kane recalls, “Zorro’s use of a mask to conceal his identity as Don Diego gave me the idea of giving Batman a secret identity. Like the foppish and wealthy Spanish count, Bruce Wayne would be a man of means who put on a facade of being effete. Zorro rode a black horse called Toronado and would enter a cave and exit from a grandfather clock in the living room. The bat-cave was inspired by this cave in Zorro. I didn’t want Batman to be a superhero with super powers.... So I made Batman an ordinary human being; he is just an athlete who has the physical prowess of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., who was my all-time favorite hero in the movies.”5 The Batman story begins when Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered on their way home from seeing The Mark of Zorro.6
The difference between Zorro and most comic book heroes is that he has no advanced technology, no exotic weapons, no supernatural powers. He has no invulnerability, is not faster than a speeding bullet, cannot fly, contort, and expand himself like plastic, nor can he turn into a human torch, swing on webs, or climb walls like a spider. His costume is simply black clothing and a mask. Though he occasionally brandishes a pistol, he relies on a sword (in one story McCulley points out that once you have fired a flint-lock, you are temporarily unarmed, but you do not need to reload a sword), and his transportation is a horse. He does not need special effects. In short, he is entirely human, much more like the reader or audience than the superheroes of
the comics and their film versions. His antagonists—corrupt, greedy politicians and their ruthless, bullying henchmen—are equally human and vulnerable. But he does have an extra kind of power in his dual identity, and to that extent acquires a special power when he is Zorro:
It is a peculiar thing to explain, señores. The moment I donned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away. My body straightened, new blood seemed to course through my veins, my voice grew strong and firm, fire came to me! And the moment I removed cloak and mask I was the languid Don Diego again.
In The Sword of Zorro, he is even more explicit: “I find that I have a dual personality, and the tamer part of me is not working at present. I am Zorro, the daring in love and war.”7
It is generally acknowledged that a probable inspiration for Zorro is Baroness Orczy’s 1905 novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel. Both protagonists use an alias and conceal their daring adventures behind a pose of ineffectuality. However, there are more differences than similarities between them. The Scarlet Pimpernel in real life is Sir Percy Blakely, who poses as a foolish fop. Don Diego is not so much a fop as he is listless and languid, complains constantly of the “turbulent times,” and pretends to abhor all danger and violence, preferring to spend his time with poetry and meditation. More significantly, the Scarlet Pimpernel’s daring consists of rescuing French aristocrats from the Reign of Terror, whether they have been honorable or tyrannical. To do so, he uses various disguises but has no distinctive Pimpernel costume and outwits the terrorists rather than fighting them. In the novel and the first two film versions (1935 and 1950), he is not a horseman or a swordsman and is already married. His French wife does not learn of his double identity until almost too late.
In The Mark of Zorro, Don Diego is an aristocrat, but he is far more democratic than the Scarlet Pimpernel. Most of the oppressed people that he defends or avenges are poor, mainly Indians or padres who have been robbed or beaten. The only aristocrats that we see being oppressed are the Pulidos, who have been impoverished by the wrath of the governor after they antagonized him. Zorro, of course, helps them, particularly because he is in love with Señor Pulido’s daughter Lolita.
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