From cop to author: Meet Stephen Colcord, novelist

LACONIA — The pandemic turned most people's lives upside down, but for Stephen Colcord, the cataclysm opened a new door in the form of fiction writing.

“I always thought I'd do it when I retired, but when COVID hit, I needed to do something with my time,” recalled Colcord, a career police officer and city resident. “Everyone forgets how boring that was. When you get home from work, you couldn't go anywhere.”

Without the ability to go out to dinner with his wife or see friends, Colcord penned two crime novels, "Collateral Lead" and "Failure to Register," drawing on his 21 years of law enforcement experience. Last year, Colcord self-published the two novels via Amazon, and is working on a third to wrap up the trilogy. Both novels take place in New Hampshire in fictionalized versions of cities such as Laconia and Portsmouth with changed names, as well as cops and crooks based on of Colcord's real-life encounters.

“If you read the book, you'll figure it out if you know the towns,” Colcord said. “'Collateral Lead' is central New Hampshire-based, but you go to different parts of the state. There's even a Stanton Daily Sun, the newspaper in the book.”

As for the spark behind the novels, Colcord said it's a common aspiration cops pick up from their social circles.

“I think everybody tells their cop friends, 'You should write a book' when you start telling stories at parties or something like that,” Colcord said.

By his own admission, Colcord never considered himself a “huge reader” or having much of an interest in the craft in his early years.

“In SATs, my math scores were probably double my verbal,” Colcord recalled. “English class was never really my thing."

As it turns out, police work requires an extensive amount of writing, and after 10 years of working for the Gilford Police Department and another 11 and a half at the Belknap County Sheriff's Office, Colcord got plenty of practice putting ink on paper.

“I've written tens of thousands of police report pages, but that's just, like, putting the facts down,” Colcord said. “What I do like about this, is you have control over what happens. You're not reporting the facts, you're creating a story. It's like a reprieve of having to be in that confine.”

Colcord's novels mainly draw from the last decade of his law enforcement career as a deputy U.S. Marshal while working at the Belknap County Sheriff's Office.

“As part of my duties there, for about six years, I was assigned to the U.S. Marshals' fugitive task force,” Colcord said. “A lot of this stuff is based on first-hand experience. It's fictionalized, it's dramatized a little bit, it's changed to fit in the story the right way.”

Due to Colcord's experience with the U.S. Marshals, the books are less of a traditional whodunnit crime novel and more of a cat-and-mouse hunt as the protagonist attempts to track down the perpetrator, with an added tone of realism.

“I would call it realistic fiction. This isn't like dust-up Hollywood, it's more like, this is how this actually happens,” Colcord said. “It's like a hybrid between that dramatized Hollywood stuff and the dry police reporting.”

The new author didn't initially set out to write three novels. Like most projects, it started small with Colcord writing small scenes and vignettes.

“A novel, to me, is just basically a scene after a scene after a scene,” Colcord said. “When you start writing a scene, then you write a second scene, and so on, it just kind of came that way. It wasn't that I was intending to write a novel specifically.”

Since releasing his books, Colcord has received positive reviews on Amazon, and has made signed copies available at the Gilford Country Store. There are also copies available at the Laconia Public Library.

Members of Colcord's social circle have had unique reactions to the novels. For his family members unaware of the details of his law enforcement career, the books provide an intimate “day in the life” view of his duties.

“The guys I worked with doing some of these cases read it differently because they find it comical. The characters are based loosely or an amalgamation of two different people I've worked with, and they think it's hilarious,” Colcord said. “We're kind of a ball-busting group of guys, who spend 12 to 18 hours a day looking for fugitives together.”

For Colcord, the books provide an entertaining way to reflect on his law enforcement career.

“Even though it's been fictionalized, it's kind of a nice way, as my beard gets a little grayer here, to remember what I've done,” Colcord said. “It's a little bit memoir-ish in that way for me, that at some point in my life I can look back, read these books and remember the actual events that have triggered these books.”