Hi, I’m Kay Schiffner, and I graduated from San Francisco’s Hasting Law School in 1954 with only two other women in my class. Not only did the professors write comments on our papers like “This is a bad way to find a husband” but also most of the male students refused to take us seriously.

I managed to get a job as a lawyer out of law school, for half the pay of the men, in a small law firm where the men believed that their gender made them better lawyers than me.

When I need a break from the stress of lawyering, I play jazz piano at clubs in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. I can let go of everything then and just perform.

Playing in a jazz band puts me in a different world, a world of Black musicians and in the middle of Black culture. A culture under siege. Segregation is quietly enforced by not allowing Negros in most downtown hotels and restaurants, and redlining where they could purchase property. And the one neighborhood that is theirs is threatened by the Redevelopment Agency.

My parents don’t like to admit they pushed me into playing jazz, much less frequenting “Negro night clubs.”

My mother innocently put me in piano lessons down the street with Mrs. Maple when I was four, as it gave her an hour without a toddler underfoot. I took to it like some kids take to sports.

I played from ear, first by listening with my parents to big bands of the 40s like Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, or Clark Terry on the radio. When I practiced alone though, all I played was bebop jazz. Charlie Parker’s music.

I was hooked the first time I heard Charlie Parker play live. Then I knew I was a musician.

I had overheard some students talking. Charlie “Bird” Parker was in town. Meant he might show up at Jimbo’s Bop City. All the great jazz musicians showed up there after hours, and you could get in for $1 or bring an instrument and get in free.

Even in law school I was still living at home. I waited until my parents went to bed, and my friend, Barb, picked me up.

“What are we doing?” she asked.

“Hanging outside at Jimbo’s Bop City in the Fillmore and hoping to hear Charlie Parker, the bebop king.”

The Fillmore was hopping, well-dressed couples going from restaurants to clubs. The air was different here, something held me like nothing before.

“You going in?” A man in a pin-striped suit held the door. “I don’t think the race police are out tonight…”

“The race police?” asked Barb

“Sometimes they don’t like us mixing and they come in and do a raid just to discourage it.”

I shut my eyes and opened them again. “Sure, we’ll go inside.”

I pulled out two dollars and we went in. I never felt so much at home in an unfamiliar place. Just then there was a commotion at the door and in come a group of men, all carrying instrument cases. I heard someone whisper, “there he is.”

My body went weak. I was in the presence of one of the greatest jazz players ever. From then on, I belonged to two worlds, one segregated from the other, and it couldn’t last.

But Not for Me, A Kay Schiffner Mystery Book 1
Genre: Historical Mystery (1950s)
Release: September 2024
Format: Print, Digital
Purchase Link

1958 San Francisco: Beatniks, Eisenhower, Fillmore District jazz and Major League baseball. As Mayor George Christopher fights an influx of organized crime and redevelopment begins to transform the city, racial and political tensions rise when a Black real estate magnate is murdered.

Kay Schiffner is a practicing lawyer by day, during a time when women were rarely hired as lawyers, and at night, secretly follows her passion for playing jazz at the Blue Moon in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, a neighborhood where good white women weren’t supposed to go.

Leitisha Boone is the Fillmore District’s only Black female club owner, having started her career in her father’s barbecue joint. She’s not about to give up her successful and elegant Blue Moon when threatened by redevelopment and betrayed by men who don’t believe women should run a business, even when threats turn deadly.

When Leitisha is arrested for murder, Kay’s search for the truth leads her from city politics to the mafia, Beatnik poets to union graft. As pressure mounts from her boss, the police force, and organized crime, Kay must make an impossible choice—to save her hard-won job as a lawyer or to risk her own life and livelihood to try and save the friend and her club that gave her music.

But Not for Me is more than a crime story with a murder to solve. Told through the experiences of two women, the story explores the dark side of gentrification in one of America’s most colorful cities.

Meet the author
Allison A. Davis is the author of poetry, short stories, and the Kay Schiffner historical mystery series. Following successful stints in ad agency work, journalism, and art criticism, Allison developed expertise in antitrust and national security law as a partner with Davis Wright Tremaine, a national AMLAW 100 law firm, trying cases in both state and federal courts. Allison’s passions for history, music, and law infuse her action with vivid detail, as does her affection for San Francisco, where she lives.