Isabel Allende’s interesting career has been marked by three distinct types of fiction: magical realism, as in “The House of the Spirits” (1985), in which she was roughly to Gabriel Garcia Marquez what Carson McCullers was to William Faulkner; historical fiction, represented by the companion novels “Daughters of Fortune” (1999) and “Portrait in Sepia” (2001); and smart children’s literature, such as last year’s “Kingdom of the Golden Dragon.” All three paths converge in “Zorro,” one of those rare and perfect matches of subject and author.

The character of Zorro – “fox” in Spanish – originated not in Mexico or Spain but in the mind of a New York journalist and pulp writer named Johnston McCulley. McCulley moved to southern California in 1908 and picked up something of the color and lore of the provincial times, though nothing at all of its history. McCulley’s first Zorro, created for a pulp adventure magazine, wasn’t the one we have come to know: He was simply a Spanish gentleman in a mask fighting for the rights of the downtrodden Mexican peasants and American Indians. In 1920, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. changed all that, turning him into a black-suited daredevil in “The Mark of Zorro.”

After the success of Fairbanks’s film, McCulley revived his hero in Fairbanks’s image, one that has been embellished by numerous actors from Tyrone Power to Guy Williams (in the late 1950s Walt Disney television series) and, most recently and successfully, by Antonio Banderas – amazingly, the first Hispanic actor ever to play the role. Along the way, Zorro was the inspiration for dozens of other crime fighting figures in popular culture. (Bob Kane, Batman’s creator, paid homage to him by having Bruce Wayne’s parents murdered while coming from a theater where “The Mark of Zorro” was playing.)

No one is sure exactly who the inspirations were for Zorro, though in the Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s “Scarlet Pimpernel,” the masked Englishman who battled French revolutionary fanatics was a likely candidate. But the Scarlet Pimpernel fought for the aristocracy, while Zorro fought against the aristocracy for the common man.

Zorro was also almost certainly modeled in part on the legendary California bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose head was said to be preserved in a jar for more than half a century until it vanished in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. (The screenplay to the 1998 film “The Mask of Zorro” ingeniously turns Zorro into the avenging brother of Joaquin Murieta.)

Ms. Allende has reached into this cultural compost heap to forge a character with a soul and a heritage. Ms. Allende (born in Peru, raised in Chile, and in recent years a resident of California) roots her story in a vivid recreation of Latin California, and she has remade Diego de la Vega into the first real all-American hero.

The offspring of a volatile union between a liberal Spanish aristocrat and an enigmatic Shoshone Indian, Diego is, literally, a noble savage, one Rousseau could not have anticipated, imbued with a romanticist’s sense of justice. “Do you truly believe that life is fair, Senor de la Vega?” he is asked. No, is his reply, “but I plan to do everything in my power to make it so.”

This Zorro does not spring fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. He stumbles through much of his early life, losing his first love and even an occasional duel; the novel could easily have been titled “Becoming Zorro.” Sent to Spain for an education (which includes exposure to the gruesome war drawings of “maestro Goya”), Diego’s innate social consciousness is nourished by contact with early 19th-century radicalism.

Initiated into the art of the saber by a Zen-like Jewish master, he learns acrobatic skills and parlor magic from performing gypsies – his costume is their all-black outfit, replete with cape and caballero hat. Fleeing the tyranny of French-occupied Spain, Diego sails for the New World, is abducted near New Orleans by the pirate Jean Lafitte. Finally, he returns to Old California to introduce the natives to western enlightenment and the Spanish dons to Indian-style justice.

A picaresque novel with postmodern flourishes – Ms. Allende winks at the reader, weaving bits of actual history in with scenes from “Zorro” movies (her Diego stuns a foe by slicing a candle in two without disturbing the flame, as Power did to Basil Rathbone in “The Mark of Zorro”) – the sinfully entertaining “Zorro” is serious fiction masked as a swashbuckler. With luck, Ms. Allende will squeeze as many sequels out of the character as Hollywood has.

Mr. Barra last wrote for these pages on Casey Stengel.