“McCulley was a first-rate talent, who could create a sense of time and place with ease, who fashioned vivid characters from stock material, who wrote action well and conveyed mood beautifully.”
From the introduction by Max Allan Collins, author of Road to Perdition and the Quarry series.
This volume features Zorro’s Fight for Life, originally published in West Magazine for April 1951 and never reprinted.
Capitán Juan Ruelas had been at his new post for only a fortnight, but already was known as an extremist in brutality. He was certain the peons and natives sheltered Zorro, their masked defender.
Don Estaban Santana relished the torture, and hatched a scheme to capture the vigilante and disgrace Don Diego Vega, unaware they were one and the same! Then Zorro had another challenger on his hands — Americano Pete Jordan, a loose cannon whose stubborn pride might kill them all!
This edition includes sixteen short stories, originally published in West, Max Brand’s Western Magazine, and Short Stories For Men.
Bold Venture Press offers the complete pulp adventures of Zorro in six volumes -- the only time the Zorro series has been reprinted in its entirety.
The creator of Zorro, Johnston McCulley (1883-1958) was born in Ottowa, Illinois, and raised in the neighboring town of Chilicothe. He began his writing career as a police reporter and became a prolific fiction author, filling thousands of pages of popular pulp magazines. Southern California became a frequent backdrop for his fiction. His most notable use of the locale was in his adventures of Zorro, the masked highwayman who defended a pueblo’s citizens from an oppressive government. He contributed to popular magazines of the day like Argosy, Western Story Magazine, Blue Book, Detective Story Magazine, and Rodeo Romances. Many of his novels were published in hardcover and paperback. Eventually he branched out into film and television screenplays. His stable of series characters included The Crimson Clown, Thubway Tham, The Green Ghost, and The Thunderbolt. Zorro proved to be his most popular and enduring character, becoming the subject of numerous television programs, motion pictures, comic books, and cartoon programs. After assigning all Zorro rights to agent Mitchell Gertz, McCulley retired to Los Angeles and died in 1958.
