Fannish 50: 2024: Everything is Murder edition: #35: Nanette Hayes mysteries - Charlotte Carter

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

As far as I know, there are only 3 in the Nanette Hayes mystery series by Charlottle Carter and I've just finished the third Drumsticks. Nanette is an African American street saxophonist in New York City. She also had studied French. The mysteries usually involve people she knows, her family. Her mom sends her to Paris (Nanette has studied French) to help her aunt in the 2nd book. She has a best friend who is a stripper. There are a lot of references to jazz songs and different parts of New York City. And Nan picks up boyfriends and lovers (a few okay but mostly bad eggs). They are enjoyable mysteries, and Nan suffers the perils of most amateur sleuths, sparring with the police, being roughed up by Bad Guys.

I did a ficlet for sweetandshort and I took the cover of book #2 Coq Au Vin and did a Parisian themed collage on the other side. I was going to make it into a postcard but it's a bit too big for that, I think.

Title: Autumn in New York
Prompt: Orange
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Fandom: Nanette Hayes mysteries - Charlotte Carter
Summary: Nanette gets a note dropped in her saxophone case.


Let it never be said that Nannette Hayes, street saxophonist extraordinaire, Grace Jones lookalike, and trouble magnet did not know her audience. It was a crisp late September day in the City that Never Sleeps. The leaves were just beginning to change into their orange and gold threads, the thermometer had firmly planted its mercury feet on the downward trek, and the people passing by wanted to hear one song.
“Autumn in New York.”

And Nan gave ‘em what they wanted. And was raking in the leaves herself. Over the course of the day, she spotted no fewer than three—three!—twenties dropped into her battered case.
But later, when she got back to her apartment and did a proper counting, she got a shock.
Not at the total, which was rich enough, a very good day, indeed. But at the note someone had left stuck with pink bubble gum to a grubby one-dollar bill. Now Nan had gotten her fair share of religious tracks plunked into her case, and she had never paid them no mind. But this one was different. It was written in a loopy, girlie hand and in pencil and on a scrap of paper Nan recognized from her own elementary school days.

The message was simple.

Please help me.

There was an address, a date, that very day, of course, and a time. Nanette studied the note carefully and wondered if it was a sick joke. Or a prank. Or the fluttering of a psychotic mind. Lord knew the city had plenty of those.

But then Nanette remembered a young black girl in a school uniform. She’d said, “My mama always liked that one.”

Liked.

Yeah.

Nanette thought she was probably a fool for even thinking about doing what she did. Nevertheless, she packed her pistol and went out to keep the appointment.

And when she discovered that young black girl, still in her school uniform with a gun in her own small hand, crying and shaking and stuttering (I-I-I didn’t do it. I just found him like this, I swear! I saw the gun and I just picked it up! You gotta help me.) over the motionless body on the floor of a vacant apartment, Nan knew she’d be right.

She was a fool and a trouble magnet. And autumn in Nan’s New York had just got a lot hotter—and a lot colder.




 


This is a challenge to post about 50 things I'm fannish about in 2024. I did the challenge in 2023 so to make it more interesting, in 2024, it's Everything is Murder edition. More info & to sign up here:https://alexcat.dreamwidth.org/1357645.html


The List (to date)

Fannish 50: 2024: #1: Jeeves & Wooster
Fannish 50: 2024: #2: Libraries
Fannish 50: 2024: #3: Facial Sheet Masks
Fannish 50: 2024: #4: Venom
Fannish 50: 2024: #5: jhope of BTS
Fannish 50: 2024: #6: the art of Edward Gorey
Fannish 50: 2024: #7: The works of Edgar Allan Poe
Fannish 50: 2024: #8: SUGA of BTS
Fannish 50: 2024: #9: Miss Marple - Agatha Christie
Fannish 50: 2024: #10: Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Fannish 50: 2024: #11: Honkaku & shin honkaku detective fiction
Fannish 50: 2024: #12: Audiobooks
Fannish 50: 2024: #13: Holiday blend coffee
Fannish 50: 2024: #14: Jazz
Fannish 50: 2024: #15: Jigsaw puzzles
Fannish 50: 2024: #16: Sherlock Holmes
Fannish 50: 2024: #17: Poetry
Fannish 50: 2024: #18: Chocolate
Fannish 50: 2024: #19: Detective Matthew Venn series - Ann Cleeves
Fannish 50: 2024: #20: Tarot
Fannish 50: 2024: #21: Poirot - Agatha Christie
Fannish 50: 2024: #22: The ocean
Fannish 50: 2024: #23: Hardboiled detectives/noir
Fannish 50: 2024: #24: Tea
Fannish 50: 2024: #25: Bees & honey
Fannish 50: 2024: #26: Campion - Margery Allingham
Fannish 50: 2024: #27: The language of flowers
Fannish 50: 2024: #28: The moon
Fannish 50: 2024: #29: Gervase Fen detective series - Edmund Crispin
Fannish 50: 2024: #30: James Bond
Fannish 50: 2024: #31: Jungkook of BTS
Fannish 50: 2024: #32: Inspector Alleyn series - Ngaio Marsh
Fannish 50: 2024: #33: Collage materials
Fannish 50: 2024: #34: RM of BTS
Fannish 50: 2024: #35: Nanette Hayes mysteries - Charlotte Carter

Comments

[smallhobbit]

That's a clever ficlet and I like the Parisian collage.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Thank you, thank you!