A. J. (Alfred John) Evans

Alfred John Evans, listed in book records as born in 1889, is best known for The Escaping Club, first published in 1921. The book is described as an account of his experiences as an English prisoner of war in Germany during the First World War, and it remains the clearest confirmed link between his life and his writing.

Available catalog and reader sources also show that he published multiple books, including crime and mystery fiction under the name A. J. Evans. That mix of wartime memoir and popular fiction gives him an interesting place among lesser-known British authors of the early 1900s.

Reliable biographical details beyond his birth year are hard to confirm from the sources I found, so some parts of his life remain unclear. Even so, his reputation rests on a memorable survival story and on a body of work that seems to have reached beyond memoir into genre storytelling.