New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
New Haven’s the backdrop for 1970s crime novel
New Haven is setting for a native son’s 1970s crime novel
When Dion Baia was a Hamden teenager in the 1990s, he got hooked on the music of the 1970s (Queen, Stevie Wonder), the crime films (“Dirty Harry,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three”) of that time and its local news stories such as urban redevelopment and the 1973 murder of Concetta (Penney) Serra in the Temple Street Garage.
Now, 16 years after he began writing his thriller about a New Haven homicide detective struggling to solve a series of murders during a week in October 1976, Baia last week finally saw his book get published.
Fans of the Doors will recognize the title: “Blood in the Streets.” That’s a phrase from the band’s song “Peace Frog”: “Blood in the streets in the town of New Haven.”
Jim Morrison, the Doors’ charismatic but controversial lead singer, wrote it after he was arrested at the New Haven Arena in December 1967 because he mouthed off at New Haven police while on stage. Baia was born in 1979, so he is far too young to have been there that night. But as a local history buff and a lover of Doors music, he used it as material for his novel.
People who live in or around New Haven will recognize other sites where key scenes take place. The book opens atop East Rock, where a man has been shot to death in a parked car. Another murder, that of a teenage girl, takes place in that same downtown parking garage where Serra was killed. The novel’s big chase begins at a Temple Street club, continues across the New Haven Green and ends in the Grove Street Cemetery. And the grand finale goes down at New Haven’s Union Station.
“I love the idea of the city being a character,” Baia told me when we met last week at the Willoughby’s Coffee Shop at Grove and Church streets. “New Haven was the perfect backdrop for gritty crime.”
This city was a lot “grittier” in the 1970s than it is today. There was also great residual tension and resentment over former Mayor Richard C. Lee’s ambitious “Model City” scheme that sent bulldozers through the Oak Street neighborhood in the 1950s and also took out large swaths of the Wooster Square area.
Baia lived on Evergreen Court, just off Legion Avenue, from 1979-86. “I remember as a kid seeing these big empty spaces, with nothing developed there.”
The book’s main character, police detective Frank Suchy, bitterly recounts the forced removal of so many people from that neighborhood. Baia writes: “People were pushed out, their homes erased, then never built upon. The empty lots stood as a stark reminder, like a forgotten battlefield after a war.”
Baia told me he was not trying to make any political statements or capitalize on anybody’s misfortune through his book. He noted that because Serra was killed in broad daylight in a parking garage near the city’s main department stores (Macy’s, Malley’s), it was “an event that shaped that era in New Haven. Her terrible murder led to people being hesitant about going downtown.” (Serra’s killer, Edward Grant, was not convicted until 2002.)
The narrative tone of “Blood
“I love the idea of the city being a character. New Haven was the perfect backdrop for gritty crime.” Dion Baia, author, “Blood in the Streets”
in the Streets” is sympathetic toward Suchy and other members of the police force. “I’ve always had an affinity for law enforcement,” Baia said. “It’s an unsung, thankless job.”
In an effort to make the scenes realistic, Baia spoke with some of the people he had known when he was with them at Hamden High School and who went on to become New Haven police officers. He also interviewed former New York City police detectives.
“One of them told me how hard it is if you take your work home with you,” Baia noted. “You’re numbing yourself from day to day. But that New York detective also said, ‘If you’re not affected by what you’re seeing, then you’re gone.’ ” Suchy uses that line in the novel.
Baia includes a flashback to that crazy night at the New Haven Arena when the Doors’ fans clashed with police as Morrison was being hauled off to the police station downtown. Suchy, then a rookie on the force, stops other officers from beating up the singer. Morrison then befriends Suchy, offering him a parttime job working as his security officer.
Baia also has a scene in 1970 at the Isle of Wight festival in England, when Morrison is weary of the rock-star lifestyle and tells Suchy he wishes they could trade places: “Do you know what the secret to life is? What is the most craved fantasy? Not sex, not money or a car or anything. It’s happiness. Peace of mind, man. You have peace of mind that you’re out there doing good. You use it to help people and that is truly beautiful.”
That scene hardly seems credible, even for a work of fiction; it’s tough to imagine “the lizard king” talking that way. There are also times when Baia’s extensive research stumbles; the Five Satins have their names spelled wrong in a song list at the end of the book, and Baia writes that the Satins composed “In the Still of the Night” on a New Haven street corner. Fred Parris, their lead singer, told me years ago that he wrote the song on his own in 1955 while he was stationed in Philadelphia for the U.S. Army.
But you have to admire Baia’s persistence and tenacity in bringing this book to print. The publisher, Post Hill Press, is a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. The book was seen on the shelves of at least one New Haven-area Barnes & Noble store last week, immediately after it was issued.
“Blood on the Streets” began as a screenplay which Baia wrote in 2002. He did several drafts but couldn’t draw any interest in getting a film made. Then in 2012 a co-worker of his suggested he turn it into a book. He did so but it took another five to six years to interest a publisher.
Baia’s day job is doing in-studio audio work for Fox News Channel in New York. When I asked him what it’s like being there in these polarized times, he said, “In conversations, I just try to keep my politics out of it. I tell people I just do the technical end of it. A job’s a job.”
Baia graduated from SUNY Purchase College’s Conservatory of Film in 2001 and has worked in New York ever since then. He now lives in Bronxville, N.Y.
Although he is excited and gratified to have “Blood in the Streets” published, he said, “I still hope to have it made into a movie.”
At the end of his acknowledgments section of the book, Baia apologizes to his readers if they have found any problems with the content or prose of his novel. Then he writes: “I was just a kid with big dreams who wanted to make a good, entertaining movie.”