The Making of a Sleuth : Bruce Cook had doubts about creating a hero from the barrio. But now, he and Chico Cervantes have become fixtures among L.A.’s literary private eyes.

In the time-honored tradition of fictional L.A. private eyes, we’ve come to expect a few standards. They are hard-boiled, hard-drinking and, when it comes to women, hardhearted.

You might call Antonio (Chico) Cervantes medium-boiled. The hero of a series of detective novels by Los Angeles writer Bruce Cook “is quicker with a one-liner than he is with a gun and would prefer to stand for right rather than might,” says one reviewer.

For Cervantes, downing two glasses of Cuervo Gold on ice passes for hitting the bottle.

And his chaotic domestic situation shows a soft heart for women. He supports Alicia, a reformed prostitute he brought back from Mexico after his first adventure in “Mexican Standoff” (1988), and her child.

With the publication by St. Martin’s Press this month of the third Cervantes book, “Death as a Career Move,” and a movie in the works based on “Mexican Standoff,” the unconventional Cervantes may be on his way to becoming a fixture among L.A. sleuths.

Cook’s impulse to create a Latino protagonist from Boyle Heights derived mainly from opportunity.

“Basically, I did it because . . . it hadn’t been done,” Cook says. “There had been a couple of Latino police detectives in books, but, to my knowledge, no private eye. And I thought it was high time--this, after all, is an Hispanic city.”

He is sitting in a quiet corner of the usually bustling Tropical Bakery, looking at the pinatas wilting in the steam from the espresso machine. Outside is the glare and roar of Sunset Boulevard as it snakes through a predominantly Latino section of Silver Lake. Cook comes here often to “soak in some of the ambience of Chico’s origins.”

Of his qualifications to invent a Latino character, Cook, 60, says he grew up in Chicago, which has a large Mexican-American population, and as a child traveled widely through Mexico with his parents.

While some might question the cultural authenticity of Cook’s work, reviewers have praised the books for bringing the Los Angeles cityscape up to date in detective fiction and for capturing its multiracial textures through the eyes of a Mexican-American, whose ethnicity is a consistent, if muted, subtext.

Gnawing at Cervantes, who has left the barrio for a West Hollywood apartment, is the uneasy recognition that he’s drifting from his roots, as occurs in “Death as a Career Move”:

Like one night Alicia turned to me in bed--turned over and looked at me--and she said, “Chico, when did you stop to be Mexican?”

She said it in English. She’d been getting pretty good with the language . . .

“What do you mean, when did I stop? I am Mexican--Mexican-American.”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“But how much one, how much the other?”

“How do I know? I don’t keep count.”

As an Anglo writer portraying a Latino hero, Cook was not without his doubts. He showed the “Mexican Standoff” manuscript to several friends, Anglos and Latinos. “There was some criticism that Chico was too white bread--and it was all from the Anglos,” Cook says. “My Hispanic friends said they found him totally believable.”

Actor-writer Richard Yniguez, past president of Nosotros, an advocacy group for Latino actors, read “Mexican Standoff” when a film version was first being discussed, but he’s not involved with the project now.

“As far as I was concerned, the character was true to life--and it was a most exciting piece of entertainment,” Yniguez says. “I found the character positive, a real human being, etched out totally. We all have problems, whether we’re Hispanic, black or Asian, and I think Bruce did a wonderful job of creating a person who takes life on its own terms.

“It’s a wonderful piece of work for an Hispanic actor, a lead who can deal with life on both sides of the border.”

Yniguez says some may take offense at a Latino-centered story based on material by an Anglo author. However, “it’s the positive side of the book that we should be looking at,” he says, “and the fact that this story can create a theatrical commodity out of whoever plays the role.”

Juan Rodriguez, arts and film editor for La Opinion, is reviewing “Death as a Career Move” for the paper. “Chico,” he says, “is a character who has strong values but also knows very well what kind of world he’s dealing with. I didn’t feel Cook misrepresented the culture in any way.”

“Mexican Standoff” finds Cervantes a stranger in Mexico, as he roams the opium-rich mountains around Culiacan in search of a fugitive hit-and-run driver and encounters the violence of the international drug trade.

“Rough Cut” (1990) keeps the detective closer to home. Encumbered by financial responsibility for Alicia and offspring, Cervantes reluctantly assumes the task of protecting the daughter of a German filmmaker from kidnapers; in addition, he locks horns with a dangerous street gang called the Companeros.

In “Death as a Career Move,” Cervantes investigates the murder of a sound editor who is working on the track for a film biography of a self-destructive rock star.

Cook’s background is as eclectic as his books. In the Army in the late ‘50s, he was stationed in Frankfurt as a German translator. Back in the States, he fell into a series of jobs in “all the public relations pits in Chicago,” he says.

“I used to call in sick just to do stories for the National Catholic Reporter and Commonwealth, for which I was paid in the high two figures,” Cook says.

In 1967, he was hired at the prestigious but now-defunct National Observer as book editor and music reviewer, four years later becoming the paper’s film reporter and reviewer. Later, he and novelist Larry McMurtry became the first contributing editors for American Film magazine. Then he became book editor for the Detroit News.

Cook’s first publishing success was not with fiction, but with nonfiction. In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, he published “The Beat Generation,” a chronicle of Jack Kerouac and others; biographies of Bertolt Brecht and Dalton Trumbo, and a book of music history, “Listen to the Blues.” “Sex Life,” his first novel, also of the crime genre, was published in 1978.

He got the idea for “Mexican Standoff” in Washington eight years ago, shortly before he moved to Los Angeles. Cook was “in a huff,” as he puts it, after an unhappy stint as book editor for USA Today, and was looking for a “quick-buck book.” (One possibility that never materialized was an “as told to” book with John Lennon’s astrologer.)

“I had long admired the private-eye genre,” Cook says. “In Detroit I’d gotten to know Elmore Leonard--he reviewed books for me--and he sort of reawakened my interest. By the time I started the book in Washington, I knew Los Angeles pretty well--I’d spent well over a year here, on and off. I was a hundred pages into it before I ended up moving to L.A.”

What readers and critics generally admire is Cook’s ability to put a new spin on a tried-and-true genre. “Bruce Cook writes like a rebel angel and gives new voice to the poetry of the L.A. private eye,” wrote Robert B. Parker, author of the Spenser detective series.

Cook finds that the genre offers structure but allows plenty of space to breathe.

“I admire the form because you have to play by the rules, but (it) still leaves a lot of room for character and setting,” he says.

While critics have been mostly laudatory, Cook concedes that he’s fallen shy of the bestseller list.

But there’s hope that the film version of “Mexican Standoff,” being packaged and scheduled for production next year, will kick Cook’s stories into a higher bracket. The movie is being produced by Just Betzer, the Oscar-winning producer of “Babette’s Feast.”

“I like stories that are about how a single event can change someone’s life,” Betzer says. “What appealed to me about Bruce’s novel was his hero. Cervantes had his life changed irrevocably when by chance he was sent to Mexico to retrieve a killer, and in doing so discovered a heritage he had all but forgotten. I have great hopes for this movie because it is at once very human and at the same time a good action-adventure story.”

Cook won’t claim Cervantes as an alter ego, but admits that the voice has grown comfortable.

“I like speaking in Chico’s voice,” he says. “He is not me and I am not him, but there is a certain overlap that we share in sensibility and values.”

“For one thing, we’re both romantics.”