Veronica Parker Johns (1907-1988) only wrote five mystery novels and several short stories before turning her attention to running a seashell shop in New York. She was a member of the Mystery Writers of America during its early years and a member of the New York Shell Club. Her first two mysteries, published in the 1940s, were about Agatha Welch, an inadvertent amateur sleuth. Her next novel featured Webster Flagg, a black actor and singer whose investments yielded not quite enough to live as comfortably as he preferred, so he hired himself out as butler and houseman, a role in which he seems to have taken a great deal of amusement. He reminds me of Harry Washington, houseman for Professor Walter Brinkley, an occasional character in the novels of Richard and Frances Lockridge.
In Flagg’s first appearance, Murder by the Day (Doubleday Crime Club, 1953) the obnoxious Mortimer Rutherford has died, apparently set on fire in his sleep by a cigarette he left burning. Only the victim and the chair he was in were incinerated, as Rutherford had a deep-seated fear of fire and he had fireproofed his entire apartment and its furnishings. Flagg knows that Rutherford’s chair had also been treated with a fire-resistant coating so somehow the chair had been replaced by another identical one. The chair in question had been purchased in multiples by Althea Tamblyn, another of Flagg’s customers and a decorator who foisted her selections on anyone in her orbit, so several of the residents of the apartment house where Rutherford and Tamblyn lived each had one. The chairs are moved around during the story like so many hot potatoes, upstairs, downstairs, in the coal bin in the basement, the chairs pop up again and again.
The suspects are all residents of the same apartment building where Rutherford lived and Flagg works, so Flagg has the opportunity to do a little unauthorized snooping as he goes about his housekeeping duties. Some of the neighbors are more colorful than the others, but I especially like the hopelessly middle-class new wife who creates floral furniture covers for the avant-garde furniture Tamblyn selected for their apartment. Rutherford was uniformly offensive to everyone so motives were plentiful but the last-minute plot twist provided a satisfying ending.
Johns wrote only one more novel and a single short story with Flagg, which is really too bad, as he is a wonderfully original character. John Norris pointed out in his blog Pretty Sinister Books on November 14, 2014, that Flagg is one of the earliest African-American detectives in crime fiction. Flagg really deserved more time on the page. See Norris’s comments here: https://prettysinister.blogspot.com/2014/11/ffb-murder-by-day-veronica-parker-johns.html
For a more comprehensive biography, see Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/johns-veronica-parker-1907-1988. See also the brief obituary published by the New York Times on 22 April 1988: https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/22/obituaries/veronica-parker-johns-mystery-writer-81.html