A debut novel at 91? Carlos Cortés of Riverside crafts whodunit – Press Enterprise

Carlos Cortés is as excited as any first-time novelist to make his debut. The difference in his case is that he’s no eager young writer. He’s 91.

It’s titled “Scouts’ Honor,” and Cortés, a retired UC Riverside professor of Latin American studies (and former consultant for Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer”), wrote it as a personal challenge.

“I had written poetry, plays, journalistic stuff, scholarly stuff,” Cortés says. “I wanted to write a damn novel!”

I attended a talk by Cortés last month at the Maloof Foundation in Alta Loma, in which he talked about his inspiration and read the first two chapters aloud.

With my bookmark already at Chapter 3, “Scouts’ Honor” kept me company on vacation in San Francisco. It’s not “Don Quixote,” but it’s pretty good.

Since my return, 88-year-old Thomas Pynchon surprised his fans with another novel. Also, Cortés’ accomplishment was put in perspective for me by my friend Doug. He said: “My mother-in-law is 91, but she’s not writing any books any time soon.”

So last Monday, Cortés joined me at Riverside’s Fairmount Park, a few blocks from the home he shares with wife Laurel, for conversation on a bench overlooking Lake Evans.

“Telling a long-form story was a challenge,” Cortés admits. “It was fun. I didn’t have five bad minutes writing it.”

“Scouts’ Honor” — a work of fiction, remember — is about a death at a Boy Scout camp in 1948 Missouri and whether the death was an accident or a homicide.

Its genesis was in the Boy Scout camp Cortés attended each summer from 1947-1951 in his native Kansas City, Missouri. Nearly every classmate participated.

In 1948, when he was 14, he was patrol leader, like his alter ego, the novel’s Chucky Karlson.

The boyish pranks of “Scouts’ Honor” — shortsheeting a bed, de-pantsing another boy and setting a “lollytrap” in the latrine to splash the unwary — really happened that summer.

So did a sexual encounter between two of the boys that was observed by fellow troopers. Days of hazing followed. That became a key part of the novel.

“Only the murder was invented,” Cortés tells me impishly. “But that’s a big thing.”

What if the victim of the hazing had taken revenge on one of his tormenters? Cortés says the real-life boy must have felt humiliated. But for the sake of a mystery, he came up with reasons why a number of people at camp — boys and adult leaders — might have resented a prankster enough to take his life.

Reporter Ardith Millett is sent to the camp to report on the death. Ardith is young and shy, overlooked in a male newsroom. Ardith discovers that the dead boy was roundly hated. But her story instead is an uplifting tale, designed to please the boy’s parents.

Portions of the novel take place in 1984, when Millett, now an award-winning newspaperwoman, seeks to tell the story she regrets not telling originally.

As Cortés put it at his Maloof talk: “It’s more than a whodunit. It’s an exploration of truth: half-truths, partial truths…”

“Scouts’ Honor” has elements of “Rashomon” and of Lawrence Durrell’s “The Alexandria Quartet,” Cortés tells me, in which the same action is recalled differently by different people.

“It’s a real page turner,” says Cati Porter, his editor and publisher at Riverside-based Inlandia Books, at the Maloof event. “It’s very much a psychological thriller.”

Cortés is proud of his book but makes no great claims for it.

“You’re willing to put up with a lot of description in ‘War and Peace’ because then you’ll have read ‘War and Peace,’” Cortés jokes to me. He knows no one would treat finishing “Scouts’ Honor” as anything to brag about and paced his story accordingly.

“It was intended to be a quick read. Pick it up, read a couple of chapters, put it down and come back to it,” he says.

Befitting Cortés’ career studying cultural diversity, prejudice plays a role in “Scouts’ Honor,” but not the way you might expect.

In Kansas City, it was so accepted that the races shouldn’t intermingle, intermarry or even use the same swimming pool that “it wasn’t even discussed,” Cortés says.

“But religion was a big deal,” he adds. “In high school, there were clubs that excluded Catholics or Jews. Nobody batted an eyelash.”

In boys’ locker rooms, showers and elsewhere, “foreskin jokes were common,” Cortés says. “All Protestants had circumcisions. So did Jews. Everyone did except Catholic kids.” One “Scouts’ Honor” boy, who is Catholic, is nicknamed Foreskin Freddy.

Cortés had his own youthful path to navigate. He was Jewish on his mother’s side, Catholic on his father’s. Religious tension in his household ran high, with each parent claiming victories along the way.

To write the character of a young female reporter in a male environment, he drew on his own outsider status, as well as on a friend, a woman who is an accomplished academic, who nevertheless suffers from “thank you-itis,” the reflex to thank everyone.

Cortés wonders what readers will make of the book. The first three sentences have a character shouting a profanity after stumbling across the dead body.

“The bawdiness might put some people off. In a sense, my first page is a trigger warning,” Cortés says, chuckling. “If you get past the first page, it’s clear sailing from here on out,”

Cortés tackled a novel just to see if he could do it. During the pandemic, he worked with an editor on several drafts, then hired a second editor for a fresh set of eyes. He incorporated their advice on how to improve the structure and eliminate repetition.

After the Inlandia literary nonprofit accepted his manuscript, Cortés did one final draft, with corrections and ideas from his third editor.