The Curse Of Capistrano

This is the first in what will continue to be something of a series, taking a look at one of the greatest swashbuckler heroes of all time: Zorro. I plan to delve into a good number of his various iterations throughout books and film–although only the ones that I feel like bothering with, otherwise we’ll be here all day. Hopefully it’ll be a lighthearted little trip through some classic derring do, as well as a fun examination of the impressions that this classic character has left upon popular culture.

First up, of course, is the 1919 novel that started it all: Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano, which later printings dramatically renamed The Mark of Zorro.

I hate to break it to ya’ll, but it’s really not that good.

Plain and simple, the book has a great (and at the time incredibly original) premise but just isn’t very well written. It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, honestly, but I remember not being terribly compelled by either the prose or the dialogue. This was a pulp story after all, and no matter how much I love pulp, the bulk of that stuff just wasn’t so great. Mark of Zorro isn’t even all that action-packed until the end, which is really a shame for a so-so serialized pulp novel. The book also has a bit too much talk of the importance of “noble blood” for my taste… I like less aristocratic elitism in my class traitor heroes.

Speaking of which, unlike most other versions of the story, the nobility of Diego de la Vega (a.k.a. Zorro) is played up so very much that he’s actually portrayed as being from one of the most powerful families in Spain. The problem with this? He comes across as having inherited such great authority that it seems he could have easily stopped the local injustices without bothering to dress up in black long underwear and grab a sword. (Granted, what fun would that be?) It’s a rather glaring plot hole that’s easily fixed by downgrading his nobility a smidgen.

The weirdest thing, probably, about reading the original Zorro tale in this day and age is that Zorro’s identity is kept a secret from the reader up until the final page. It’s like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde in that the dual identity is so entrenched into our cultural consciousness nowadays that it’s bizarre to even imagine it once having been a surprise. Although, while reading The Mark of Zorro I couldn’t help wondering if, had I not already known the big twist, I would have been sitting there puzzling over why the hell McCulley was spending so much time on this de la Vega moron.

Oddities aside, it is a very important book, and to a large extent this is because ever-so-noble Diego de la Vega is, as mentioned earlier, such a huge class traitor. While the story’s lasting cultural legacy is its extension of the dual identity hero idea from The Scarlet Pimpernel, (a book that I may write about at length someday… if I feel like it) the difference insofar as who Zorro fights and who he protects is a major highpoint in my mind. I like my heroes protecting the disenfranchised from the rich, not vice versa. But, of course, what really makes the story stand out plot-wise is the protagonist’s use of the mask to affect a very definite, and entirely separate, presence for his hero side. This was, of course, a precursor to Superman and just about every superhero to come after him.

So yes, all told, The Mark of Zorro is a good book to read if you want to see where many things began–including but not limited to the Zorro concept itself. But really, if you what you want is to be entertained, this is one instance in which I would mutter the phrase that is such an anathema to literary types: “Just see the movie.”