Johnston McCulley (1883-1958) was a police reporter before he became proflic and successful writer for pulp magazines and for Hollywood. His serial, The Curse of Capistrano , published in All-Story Magazine in 1919, made him world famous the following year when the film version, starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr., was released under the title The Mark of Zorro. The rest, as they say, is history. A total of sixty-five Zorro stories appeared in subsequent decades, along with a great variety of non-Zorro material, in such magazines as Argosy, and West. He virtually invented the masked-avenger genre with such characters as the Green Ghost, the Thunderbolt, and the Crimsoon Clown. His screen credits extended over many years, from Brute Breaker (1919) to The Ice Flood (1926) and Doomed Caravan (1941). The Black Star is an exciting tale of crime and adventure, the first in a series.