Francis Everton was a pseudonym for Francis William Stokes, an engineer and the managing director (later chairman) of Stokes Castings, Ltd., a family firm located in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire (apparently the "Everton" in Francis Everton came from his mother, Harriet Everton). Stokes' father, William Edward Stokes, started an iron foundry, the basis of the family fortune (and the setting of Stokes' detective novel The Hammer of Doom); before that the Stokes family line was headed by three generations of butchers, going back to the 1700s. 

Stokes was a key figure in the development of the centrifugal-casting process.  His six Francis Everton mystery novels were favorably reviewed and four of them were published in the United States as well as England.  Insoluble was praised by Compton Mackenzie "as a good murder story because the murder itself is credible and the characters are recognizable human beings."  Dorothy L. Sayers found it "intriguing and full of life and movement."

In an author's note at the beginning of Insoluble Stokes thanks his wife and his brother for the "considerable help" they gave him with the novel.  Stokes' brother, Arthur Meredith Stokes (1886-1965), was a solicitor, just like the narrator of the novel.  It is also worth nothing that Stokes' two sisters, Edith May and Margaret Elizabeth, were teachers, like Annabel Strange in the novel.

Bibliography

The Dalehouse Murder (1927)

The Hammer of Doom (1929)

Murder at Plenders (1930)

The Young Vanish (1932)

Insoluble (1934)

Murder May Pass Unpunished (1936)