When you're an undercover cop, a bar bust presents a few challenges.
     “You're going in with a smaller handgun, no backup ammunition, no radio, no handcuffs,” explained Mark Kelly, who served 21 years in the East Hartford Police Department. “You're just going in with personality. If the gun comes out, something went very wrong.”
     In retirement, Kelly, a long time Hebron resident, swapped his weapon with a pen, jotting years of police stories down in black and white, and offering an unfiltered depiction of a job that can be both dull and thrilling.
     It's also dangerous.
     “That's the fun part,” Kelly, 64 conveyed. “There's a certain pride in it.”
     At the end of March, Kelly published his second book: Froggers, A Front Row Seat To Undercover Police Work. A “frogger,” he explained, is a term derived from the more gritty side of police work; when a person dies from a fentanyl overdose, patrol officers have observed, their body contorts itself in such a manner that resembles a frog.
     The 238-page story diverges from narrative often sensationalized in Hollywood. Reality, Kelly said, can be much different. With the tagline, “This isn't a crime novel, it's a cop story,” Froggers is partially a continuation of Kelly's first book released in 2020, Front Row Seat, and fleshes out the culture of being a police officer in urban Connecticut.
     “In many ways, that book was an answer to people asking, “Why do cops react the way they do?” Kelly said, adding that his new book shows the follow up of the serious crime, such as a homicide or burglary, and is based entirely on events and personalities he encountered over his long career. “Everything in the book really happened.”
     This week, Kelly sat down with the Rivereast to discuss his newfound passion for storytelling and why readers should pick up a copy before their next trip to the beach this summer.

      More on Froggers and Front Row Seat can be found on Kelly's website, acopstory.com and both can be purchased on Amazon.com, Barnesandnobles.com, booksamillion.com, stillwaterbooks.com and bookshop.org.

     “This is Very Real”
     Sitting inside the Marlboro Country Bakery, it's clear that despite being retired, Kelly's old instincts are still intact. He immediately identified where the exits were, and he picks up body language of those in the store as he would any subject on the street.
     “It's still there,” he affirmed, referring to his law enforcement mindset, but just a bit dialed back. Throughout his career Kelly has always been able to switch between lifestyles - a healthy balance of leisure and work.
     “A friend of mine once said, ‘I don't get it, you're buying drugs in East Hartford and then you come down here and are hanging out in your boat-isn't that two different worlds?’ I go, yeah it's kind of fun!”
     After growing up in Vernon, Kelly dropped out of college and served six years in the Marine Corps. His police career included time as a patrol officer, investigator in the detective bureau - vice and narcotics (the subject of Froggers), sergeant in the detective bureau, sergeant in the patrol division and operator of the department's emergency response team.
     “I'm not a writer,” Kelly acknowledged. “The only writing I did was police reports and warrants.”
     Taking snippets and memorable moments from his career proved to be difficult at first, at least when it came to describing characters with in-depth detail. Over a cup of coffee, it's easy to tell story, Kelly conveyed, but articulating nonverbal interactions and feelings - while simultaneously being entertained - is a different skill.
     “That's all new to me and I had to learn as I went along,” he said.   

     “Front Row Seat” lives up to the promise in it's subtle; It's certainly not a crime novel, or a novel at all. But it is a story about cops, or more accurately a series of anecdotes drawn from a thinly fictionalized police department that layout Kelly's view of policing and expose a clear sympathy for the challenges he believes he and his fellow officers face and an equally clear disdain for police administrators and much of the public that police serve.
     Kelly, a Hebron resident, is retired from the East Hartford Police Department after 21 years as a patrol officer, investigator, detective sergeant and patrol sergeant. He calls the town he writes about North Hayward, Connecticut, and explains in his preface that “the experiences … in the novel actually happened, just not in the way I depict them here.”
     The officers he worked with, he writes in his preface, “are, by and large, a group of men and women who, day in and day out, go to work, strap on a gun belt, body armor, handcuffs and do all the best job they can with the citizens who don't really want them there, clueless administrators, and a few colleagues who find more satisfaction messing with their co-workers, then going out and doing police work.”
     But while Kelly's stories often devolve into rants about all the things he dislikes about the modern policing, they also remind his readers that cops do care about the people they meet. In one scene, two officers are assigned to watch over a 7-year-old who's at the police station because his mother was just found dead in her bedroom. Officers took pains to shield him from the bad news, fed him, try to amuse him with TV, and take his hands for a walk across their parking lot through the fire headquarters next door to “visit the firemen and play on their trucks.” Their playfulness extends to urging him to ring the bell outside the fire headquarters as loud as he can (as a practical joke to annoy the firefighters, especially a deputy fire chief who was an old neighbor of one of the cops).

     While one officer tells a trainee “one of the best skills you can have on the job is to relate to everyone, regardless of their social status” others mock instructors brought in for diversity training.
     Though the book lacks the plot and character development that masks most novels, it's not that Kelly isn't an able storyteller. One chapter details a dramatic car chase that ends with the suspects fleeing on foot:
     “’Get ready for a foot chase,’ came someone's voice over the radio. As if on cue the (pursued car) turned right, sliding down the slope of the dike, dust and dirt kicking up from under it as all four wheels braked hard; the driver lost control and couldn't avoid crashing with a metallic bang into a large metal dumpster behind a warehouse. Within the dust cloud, four doors of the wrecked (car) flew open, and four shadows fled in different directions. Streetlights and security lights on the building rooftops, along with cruiser headlights and flashing emergency lights destroyed everyone's night vision, making the running shadows almost invisible and obstacles impossible to see.” From the moment of the radio call about a fleeing vehicle comes into the capture of its occupants, Kelly keeps up the adrenaline-fueled drumbeat of the officers’ pursuit.
     Another chapter gives a dramatic narration of a police raid. A truly compelling chapter is basically a thinly fictionalized retelling of the killing of East Hartford officer Brian Aselton as he responded to a noise complaint.
     Not every episode in this cop story is as dramatic as those. Some are just sad. After recounting a sexual encounter between two drunken men behind a dumpster that ends with one of the men dead, the book's trainee says:
     “Part of me thinks it's sad, you know, the way the two guys behind the dumpster live. Part of me thinks it's pretty funny, especially the way you guys handled it.”