(1883-1958)
Illinois-born McCulley was a newspaperman who worked for the Police Gazette and other popular journals before trying his hand at fiction. His one great creative success came early in his career. Looking at the pulp markets to which he hoped to contribute, McCulley saw the growing popular appeal of westerns and historical adventure fiction. He fashioned a combination of the two genres in a novel he sold to All-Story Weekly and which that periodical printed in five issues between August 9 and September 6, 1919. Titled The Curse of Capistrano, the serial introduced the world to the masked swordsman and defender of the defenseless, Zorro—the Fox. Set in the Spanish colonial era of 19th-century California, Capis-trano told of a brutal regime that made life miserable for the peasants and innocents of the region until the arrival of a remarkable, mysterious avenging figure in black, who meted out swift, unexpected justice with a deadly blade. Zorro, beneath his disguise, was Don Diego Vega, the son of a wealthy and liberal landowner, and, to most who knew him, considered something of a useless, poetry-reading fop. If the concept of the vain dandy transformed into a ruthless nocturnal hero reminded some of Baroness orczy’s popular character, the Scarlet Pimpernel, it was likely not coincidence. McCulley had cleverly grafted the Pimpernel’s shtick onto a vague version of the legend of Joaquin Murieta, the rebellious Spanish avenger of Old California. Mc-Culley was no great writer, but Capistrano, and the Zorro tales that followed—The Further Adventures of Zorro, published in Argosy throughout May and June of 1922, Zorro Rides Again in that same magazine late in 1931, and various other sequels over more than three decades—were fast flavorful, and fun. Like many another storyteller in this period and after, McCulley benefited from a highly successful film adaptation of his work, The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks in the lead (McCulley sensibly retained the film’s title for the eventual topic publication of his serial). The character remained among the best-known and most popular of any pulp-derived character, a figure to rank beside Tarzan in name recognition value, and his adventures were dramatized over and over in the movies and on television, in America and abroad.
McCulley tried again and again to make lightning strike twice, but his many and varied subsequent masked avengers and swashbuckling heroes, including the Avenging Twins, the Thunderbolt, and the Man in Purple, failed to match his early success.
Works
- Alias the Thunderbolt (1927);
- Black Grandee (1955);
- Black Star, The (1921);
- Black Star’s Campaign (1924);
- Black Star’s Return (1926);
- Black Star’s Revenge (1934);
- Blocked Trail, The (1933);
- Blood on the Saddle (1957);
- Broadway Bab (1919);
- Caballero, The (1947);
- Canyon of Peril (1935);
- Crimson Clown Again, The (1928);
- Demon, The (1925);
- Devil’s Doubloons, The (1955);
- Flaming Stallion, The (1932);
- Further Adventures of Zorro (1926);
- Ghost Bullet Range (1945);
- Gold of Smoky Mesa (1942);
- Gunsight Showdown (1956);
- Gunsmoke Vengeance (1957);
- Holsters in Jeopardy (1939);
- Iron Horse Town (1952);
- John Standon of Texas (1924);
- Mark of Zorro, The (1924), also published as The Curse of Capistrano;
- Masked Woman, The (1920);
- Range Cavalier, The (1933);
- Range Lawyer (1932);
- Rangers’ Code, The (1924);
- Riders Against the Moon (1935);
- Senor Avalanche (1946);
- Sign of Zorro, The (1941);
- Spider’s Debt, The (1930);
- Spider’s Den, The (1925);
- Spider’s Fury, The (1930);
- Tenderfoot, The (1957);
- Texas Showdown (1953);
- Trusted Outlaw, The (1934);
- White Man’s Chance, A (1927);
- Zorro Rides Again (1931)
