 Instead, he turned to writing.Evans worked both as a novelist, producing mystery novels and stories with his wife, Kay Harris Evans, under the pseudonym Brandon Bird (and later Harris Evans), and later as a non-fiction writer, writing on the topics of upland bird hunting and bird dogs.Evans' mystery writing began with "Never Wake a Dead Man" (1950), in which he introduced the characters of Hamp and Carmel, modeled after himself and his wife, who, while on a hunting outing, come upon a multiple murder mystery that they set out to solve.