Dredging this up:
Yep. And the original novel was meant to be a standalone, so McCully wrapped everything up at the end, with Zorro revealing his true identity to the world, hanging up his mask, and settling down to live happily ever after with Carlotta. The End.
Then the movie made Zorro a sensation and, being no fool, McCully ignored the ending of his own book to write an ongoing series of Zorro novels for the rest of his life.
I seem to recall that, not unlike Dr. Watson's various spouses, Zorro's wife (wives?) and love interests tend to come and go without explanation.
Since we had this conversation, I've tracked down and read the four novel-length Zorro serials that Johnston McCulley wrote -- the first two of which are in public domain and easy to find, the latter two of which have audiobook editions that can be borrowed on Hoopla. I wanted to see how McCulley dealt with doing more Zorro stories after Diego revealed his identity in the original.
It turns out that McCulley did
not ignore the ending of the original after all.
The Further Adventures of Zorro (1922) not only keeps Zorro's identity public, but is specifically about his enemy Captain Ramón (retconned from dead to "left for dead," which is reconcilable with how his apparent death was portrayed) hiring pirates to abduct Diego's fiancee Lolita as revenge for his actions as Zorro. The only real concession it makes to reflect the Douglas Fairbanks movie is to avoid describing Zorro's costume, which was different in the movie than in
The Curse of Capistrano (where it was multicolored and had a full-face cowl Zorro had to pull up to eat or drink). Later stories will describe it as all-black, though.
Zorro Rides Again (1931) also keeps Zorro's identity public, with Diego having to come out of retirement to prove he's
not the impostor Zorro going around attacking people to besmirch his name. McCulley keeps Diego conveniently single by revealing that Lolita fell ill after the events of
Further Adventures and has been recuperating in Spain for three years. There is one retcon this time, in that Diego is claimed to have killed Ramón at the end of
Further Adventures when it was actually an ally of Zorro's who finished him off. It could be chalked up to a misunderstanding, except that Diego claims it himself and the story stresses that a caballero's word is unimpeachable.
After that came four short stories from 1932-5, which I've only read summaries of; they seem to treat Zorro's identity as secret, though I don't know if they bother trying to reconcile it with the serials. The final serial,
The Sign of Zorro, came out in 1941, a year after the Tyrone Power movie. The conceit here is that Diego has been retired as Zorro for several years, having married Lolita but reverted to his foppish, dissolute ways after she died of fever, so that people outside his inner circle no longer believes he was actually Zorro, a belief encouraged by the Vega family’s misinformation campaign. It’s a moderately plausible retcon, although Sgt. Gonzales is back to seeing Zorro as an enemy of unknown identity, even though he was fully in the loop as an ally in the previous two serials. Another major retcon is that Diego's indigenous servant Bernardo has been cured of being mute, and his deafness is forgotten.
I’d thought that the final serial would explain why Zorro’s identity was a secret again in the later short stories, but it ends the same way the first one did, with Diego revealed as Zorro, pardoned, and retiring to get married. So the subsequent stories just ignored the serial continuity and made Zorro's identity secret again without explanation. I don't know, maybe they were meant to take place before or during the original serial. I haven't been able to find them anywhere except in an expensive multi-volume hardcover collection which I'm not motivated enough to buy, so I don't know.
But at least where the four serials are concerned, it's surprising how tight the continuity ended up being, in contrast to what I expected. McCulley did some contrived things to reset the status quo, but for the most part, he justified them within the original continuity, with surprisingly few inconsistencies.
