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He self-published “The Calling: The Making of a Veteran Cop” last year, and the sales of the book were so vigorous that it soon got picked up by a Michigan publisher, Thunder Bay Press.
If getting a publisher wasn’t enough of a response to his message in a bottle, he also heard from a lot of police officers who found the book’s true-to-life account of the first five years of a police officer’s career compelling.
Marcou even heard from police officers in Australia, and that might have been the response that pushed him toward putting out his second book, the recently published “S.W.A.T.: Blue Knights in Black Armor.”
“They actually demanded a second book,” Marcou said. “It’s been humbling to hear how many people have been moved by it.”
A former lieutenant with the La Crosse Police Department, the now-retired Marcou can write with authority on how a special weapons and tactics team works. He was a member of La Crosse’s award-winning SWAT team and is an award-winner himself, named the 2004 ASP SWAT Officer of the Year.
Although he’s retired from the police force, Marcou still works in law enforcement training, and it was that work that led him to write his first book. He wanted police officers in training to have a better idea of the life they faced.
“Hollywood has been so cruel to law enforcement,” Marcou said. “How does a young recruit find a role model?”
Officer Grant O’Neil of the West Australian Police heard about Marcou’s first book through Street Survival Newsline e-mails he regularly gets, and he ordered a copy directly from Marcou. He was so impressed, he was among the first in line to order the second book.
“For me the books are very interesting for two almost opposite reasons,” O’Neil said in an e-mail interview. “On one level, after over 11 years in ‘the job,’ I can relate to many of the experiences. Yet at the same time, since the books reflect policing in the United States there are many things that are quite different to how we do things here. Interestingly, I am finding through reading them that even as what most would consider to be a ‘veteran’ officer, I am learning — or re-learning — ideas from the books.”
O’Neil was not quite finished reading the second book, but said he was thoroughly enjoying it. “I suspect that I will have similar feelings at the end of it as I did after the first time I read the original book: a sense of loss as I have to leave characters that I have come to know and like,” he said.
The main character in Marcou’s books, Dan McCarthy, is an officer with the La Claire Police Department. His comrades in the first book — Sgt. Dave Compton and officers Randy Stammos, Gary Carpenter and Stanley Brockman — are back in “S.W.A.T.” along with a new cast of characters, including big-city gangsters, a female officer new to the SWAT team, a liberal judge known for letting criminals off the hook and a psychotic marijuana grower who decides to launch a counteroffensive in the war on drugs.
The new book also includes a visit to La Crosse, with depictions of some familiar places.
While Marcou had training primarily in mind with the first book, “S.W.A.T.” has a different purpose. “The first one I wrote was for the students to give them perspective,” Marcou said. “This one’s pure novel for the reader.”
And Marcou said he feels like he succeeded. “I was told by the publisher that this was a novel from beginning to end. Primarily a good read, a realistic read,” he said. “It’s going to make a police officer step away and be proud to be a police officer, and it’s going to make someone who is not a police officer feel like it was not a waste of time reading this book.”
There’s a lot more intense action in “S.W.A.T.” than in Marcou’s first book, which stems from the fact that the SWAT team is only called in when there’s very serious trouble. “You’ve got the mother lode of badness going on,” Marcou said.
The book also has occasional doses of humor and might merit an “R” rating if it were a movie, thanks to profane language and scenes of a sexual nature.
If it did become a movie, Marcou said he’d like to see Matt Damon play McCarthy so Damon could make up for giving police officers such a black eye with the character he played in “The Departed.”
Marcou is still thinking about whether he’ll write a third book. He usually has a lull in his law enforcement training schedule in the winter, when he’s stuck inside anyway, so he’s considering another novel.
“I never pictured myself as a writer,” Marcou said. “I guess I am. I didn’t know it but I guess I am.”
If he does write another book, O’Neil wants it to be something like “McCarthy Down Under,” taking place in Australia where the SWAT team is the TRG, which stands for tactical response group or “terribly rough guys.”
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