Morris PI

by Dion Baia

  Chapter 19 – Pervitin were tablets the Germans supplied to their soldiers, particularly their pilots, which basically was an early version of crystal meth.

  Chapter 22 – By 1943, New York’s cabaret laws on the books made it so all musicians had to carry “cabaret cards” to be allowed to perform in bars, halls and nightclubs. These licenses could be pulled or revoked at the slightest perceived “offense”, which basically blacklisted a musician from performing in New York City.

  Chapter 23.5, 24 & 25 – The confession serial killer Albert Fish delivers is the word for word confession the fiend sent in a letter to the mother of Grace Budd, a ten-year-old child he murdered and ate. If it can be believed, the most heinous of the details of his letter were omitted because of the sheer horror. The physical letter was the piece of evidence which led to Fish’s arrest, by tracking the letterhead on the paper to a boarding house that the killer had recently lived.

  The method by which Josef Mengele murders Laszlo Strozek was the way he would euthanize the twins he would experiment on; by stopping their hearts at the same virtual moment, so he could then dissect the bodies and analyze the differences in the physiology of the twins. His goal was to figure out how to genetically engineer twins, specifically Aryans, so they could then impregnate a woman so to guarantee they would have twins, and then grow their population by double or perhaps triple within only a generation or so.

  The grisly facts, points and stats Mengele discusses in this chapter sadly are all factual and correct, despite how unpleasant and disturbing they might be. Books like Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklos Nyiszli; Devil’s Doctors: Medical Experiments on Human Subjects in the Concentration Camps by Christian Bernadac; Mengele: The Complete Story by Gerald Posner and John Ware; and finally Darkness Visible: Memoir of a World War II Combat Photographer by Charles Eugene Sumners, among many others, were invaluable for his dialogue to be historically accurate to the letter.

  Chapter 28 – The M42 basement, known as the substation 1T & 1L, was in fact a top-secret sublevel far below Grand Central Terminal, considered the deepest in all of New York City. It houses the AC-to-DC converters that provided electricity to the terminal, the surrounding buildings that stood above the underground railyard, and the power to the track’s third rails. This area was a wartime target as German spies hoped to stop troop movement around the Northeast by knocking out the converter turbines by throwing something as simple as sand into the machinery. For that reason, it was kept a secret and placed under twenty-four guard during the war years, and persons risked being shot onsite-no questions asked-if caught trespassing.

  Epilogue – Josef Mengele, among many other Nazi war criminals, were able to escape Europe during the final days of the war simply due to the chaos that was ensuing, and the overwhelming number of civilians who were displaced during the conflict. Many Nazis simply blended in with the refuges. Mengele used his real name first but went unnoticed because the list of war criminals was still being compiled, and because serendipitously he did not have the usual SS blood group tattoo that almost all Waffen-SS Nazi members had under their arm. This tattoo denoted their blood type, which became an undisguisable war marker post-war, as identification of Waffen-SS. He obtained false papers and eventually escaped Germany in 1949, managing to obtain a passport from the International Committee of the Red Cross under another alias, which allowed him to South America, where he lived in obscurity as allied forces believed him already deceased. His family eventually joined him, and he lived comfortably until his death in 1979. Exhumation of his body and dental records confirmed the identity in 1985, and DNA testing again confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt in 1992. His remains are now stored at the São Paulo Institute for Forensic Medicine.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I promise not to make this nearly as long as my 2018 book’s acknowledgment section was. That novel’s backstory was a tale to tell.

  This project was another in the cycle that was first written as a screenplay starting as far back as 2002. It was the alternate to Blood in the Streets; which meant that when I wasn’t working on one or if I was stumped, I’d jump to the other and put the current one on the backburner so it could percolate, and once it came back to a boil in a month or so, and I was hitting the wall with the current project, I’d switch the pots. I pushed myself to work on one or the other incessantly.

  But as with my other screenplay, Blood in the Streets, once completed, it was impossible to get anyone interested or frankly even to talk to anyone in the industry without an agent. To complicate matters, the only connections at my day job, Fox News, were to people who almost completely dealt exclusively with nonfictional, current-event, mostly political literary content—far from the material I was pumping out: historical fiction thrillers like Morris PI or a 1970s police genre pastiche, Blood in the Streets. (I go into the journey of how and why the script for Blood was turned into a book in the acknowledgments of that 2018 novel.) So, in 2019, Morris PI became the second to be adapted into a novel.

  The original screenplay was set out to be a love letter to the world of the serials found within the movies and radio shows of the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s; to the private detective literary genre of the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s and the legendary authors of that era; and to the subgenre of films of my childhood that took those ingredients and sprinkled a small element of the fantastical to make them all really cook with gas. Stuff like the Indiana Jones Trilogy, The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy (1990), Batman (1989), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But I didn’t want to satirize the content like an Indy or Roger Rabbit may do, but instead treat it with all the seriousness of a The Boys From Brazil, Angel Heart, The Untouchables, Chinatown or even a Blade Runner.

  Another huge particular influence on this story was the series of gangster/thriller films made by Warner Brothers and other the Hollywood studios in the late 1930s and 1940s that seemed to always use that amazing summer-stock of actors playing the heavies. Men like Peter Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Sidney Greenstreet, Lionel Atwill, Rondo Hatton, Barton MacLane—heck, we can even throw Vincent Price in there for good measure due to his sheer villainy, among maybe a dozen other character actors of the era that have today sadly fallen into obscurity. From these geniuses we now have those classic archetypes they articulated and established from the source material, which went on to become the standard tropes of a genre, and almost become clichés of those very same genres because of the sheer over-frequency of use. Things that the hands of time have made us (as audience members) all but forget- where these particular “character types,” “styles,” and /or “devices” used within stories even originated from. The blueprints that were laid down by these master thespians that have been followed and evolved for almost a century now, I can only hope can be seen within this story here. And I hope, an educated eye may even guesstimate without a doubt, where those iconic actors above would be cast and who they would be playing within this story here.

  Also, I have to mention a writer I discovered almost two decades ago that influenced subsequent rewrites of the original spec script drafts of Morris PI, a man named Chester Himes. I discovered him while doing deep dives into the pulp/private detective/crime/cop/police procedurals literature of the era, following the gradual evolution in those subgenres. I serendipitously stumbled onto his incredible and groundbreaking Harlem Cycle and his iconic detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones, which were game changers. As influential as writers like Hammett, Biggers, Gardner, Chandler, and Spillane were for me- the unbelievable perspective and simplicity that Himes brought to the detective genre (for me, a guy writing a story that was also set within the world of Harlem roughly within the same era) was incalculable.

  Now right off the bat, I have to thank the one who this book is dedicated to: my wife, Helen Grace. She had to read my early drafts and decipher the complication of what I can only gather is a self-diagnosed dyslexia. So, she’d give me a piece of her mind while pouri
ng over it all my incoherent scribes, but she was there to get through it before it left the house. Thank you, my darling.

  Next, I have to thank again the writer, producer, director, and professor, my friend, Robert J. Siegel. Bob was my professor while I was in film school. Upon graduation my idea was to write myself into the movie industry with a script (or two), and Bob was kind enough to volunteer his time to read revisions of this and the Blood in the Streets script. Those brainstorming sessions early on were clutch for me because in those days, he was the only outside person taking the time or even who cared to read my content and the subsequent revisions, and give me feedback. So once again, my hats off to Bob for being such an amazing person and friend.

  I’d like to thank my parents Pat and Clare for their support as always, as well as my beloved sister Nicole, who continues to inspire me every day.

  I’d like to also give a shout-out to my old film school friends, Aaron Lenchner, and my podcasting cohort in crime, J. Blake Fichera. The whole catalyst for the idea of writing a story like this—the original concept of a period private detective with a fantastical element injected in—was from my long talks with Aaron. It came from our mutual love for the detective genre both in film and in print, and particularly those crossover stories that added a dose of science fiction to the old tried-and-true formula. Those conversations were the original spark that got the little light on in my head that started to grow in intensity, and got me wanting to try my hand at a pulp detective yarn. (Though Aaron was pitching me aliens, and that was a little too crazy, even for me! Ha.) And Blake was there in the early days as I sounded out the plot, to bounce ideas off of, and was kind enough to read a draft in screenplay form, and his notes were spot on.

  I’d also like to thank all my other friends, old and new, including a shout-out again to Kevin Pickney, who also read this back when it was still a screenplay and gave me notes. He then was also a sounding board for when I converted it from script to novel, always showing an interest in the story’s progress. Along with all the rest of my friends, I’d like to thank you for all your support and reassurance.

  Thank you to Anthony Ziccardi and his crew at Post Hill and Permuted Press. His help, support, and advice between books and getting this novel written and to market was fantastic. Thank you also to Heather King and her team. I’d like to thank everyone at Dupree Miller—Lacy Lynch and Dabney Rice. Thank you again to Felicia A. Sullivan for her help in the editing process. Also, a huge thank you to Clayton Ferrell for all his detailed help in the final stages. And a BIG thank you to Joe Rombi for all the last-minute help too. Thank you all.

  This project was the second in a long, winding journey that also took nearly twenty years to come to light, and another which lived within my head for so long that it’s still mind-boggling to me that this would ever be read past a few of my close friends, if any. Thank you everyone who helped make it all possible, and here’s to one day getting this and its older brother Blood in the Streets turned back into screenplays and up onto the now-defunct silver screen!

  About the Author

  Dion Baia was born in New Haven, Connecticut, where he grew up before moving to its suburb, Hamden. He graduated from SUNY Purchase College’s Conservatory of Film in 2001, and immediately began working in the industry—specifically, behind the camera in television at Fox News, doing in-studio audio on shows like Your World with Neil Cavuto, Hannity & Colmes, The Kelly File with Megyn Kelly, Hannity, The Story with Martha MacCallum, The Greg Gutfeld Show, and Kennedy, among others.

  It was during this time at his day job that he first wrote his 2018 book Blood in the Streets, as well as Morris PI: The Men from Ice House Four, both as screenplays, in an effort to break out from behind the camera and transcend beyond a technical capacity into cinema. After having no luck getting eyes on these works, and now two others—an inner-city gothic horror script and a revenge western screenplay—he decided in 2012 to translate Blood in the Streets and Morris PI into novel form.

  In 2011, Mr. Cavuto began using Dion in front of the camera on his show, where Dion acted as a kind of comic relief in order to help promote the new channel the Fox Business Network. He periodically appeared, performing small, self-written comedic vignettes and encouraging viewers to call their television providers to “Demand It” (“It” being FBN).

  That same year, he also began his podcasting career, and in 2014 cofounded the Saturday Night Movie Sleepovers, a nostalgic deep-dive into the films that helped shaped his life. He also graduated to contributing weekly to panel segments on Your World, which he still continues to do to this day.

  In 2018 he published his first novel, Blood in the Streets, with Post Hill Press. In 2020, Dion costarred in the John Schneider comedic car chase adventure film, Stand On It! and will return in the 2021 sequel, Poker Run.

  He currently lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife Helen-Grace; their son Babe, an opinionated Yorkshire Terrier; and their cat Tofu Roberta.