Excuse for sabbatical becomes Fr. Townsend, Jesuit supersleuth

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 27, 1998 by Pamela Schaeffer

PORTLAND, Ore. -- Time came mid-career for Jesuit Fr. Brad Reynolds when he had to get away. He took a sabbatical, wrote a mystery novel as a lark and now is following his fictional creation. Fr. Mark Townsend, from adventure to adventure in the nation's Northwest.

Townsend, a sort of Jesuit Everyman turned sleuth, is most often found away from his Seattle parish, sidetracked by murder and mayhem. On the trail of killers following a funeral Mass in Seattle, he's off to a Yup'ik village on Alaska's Bering Sea Coast to help solve a murder done with a carved Eskimo knife. Intending to make a simple. April visit to his beloved grandparents in LaConner, Wash., he finds himself trapped on an island in the Puget Sound trying to outwit killers of his grandfather's friend. One day Townsend is handing tissues to a woman crying in his office. Another day, he's stalking the murderer of a youth whose body was found in a Seattle park. For this Jesuit, a bit "bewildered by evil," as Reynolds sees it, God's call to truth and justice sometimes means telling chancery officials to cool it because, albeit reluctantly, he's got some detective work to do.

So far, Reynolds has two Fr. Mark Townsend mysteries in print, Story Knife (the Yup'ik village) and Ritual Death (LaConner), both published by Avon Books. A third is expected to be released later this year, and Avon has contracted for a fourth.

Reynolds, 49, has been writing and taking pictures as long a he's been a Jesuit. His photojournalism, published in secular and Catholic publications and displayed in galleries around the country, has taken him all over the world -- to Latin America, Asia, Africa -- and to Alaska, the place he likes best. In the 1980s, he made two extended visits on assignment for National Geographic. Immersing himself in embattled indigenous cultures, he wrote two articles with Jesuit Fr. Don Doll, a renowned photo-journalist who teaches at Creighton University. The first article, "Eskimo hunters of the Bering Sea" was published in June 1984; the second, "Athapaskans along the Yukon," about Alaska's Indian culture, appeared in February 1990.

Reynolds and Doll had met at the Jesuit Artists Institute in Omaha in 1977, the year Reynolds was ordained. Within a year they began collaborating on the articles.

Today Reynolds works as executive assistant to the Jesuit provincial of the Oregon province and as its formation director, overseeing nearly 50 Jesuits-in-training scattered around the United States. As Jesuits here tell the story, the province's history began when a wagonload of six Jesuits, including Fr. Peter DeSmet, turned up in Montana in 1841, invited there by the Flathead Indians. The province today covers Oregon, Washington, Montana, Idaho and Alaska -- the largest U.S. Jesuit province geographically, the poorest financially, where some 300 Jesuits work among the largest number of unchurched people in the nation.

The lumberjacks

It's a part of the country where, according to Reynolds, Jesuits tend to be "a little rustic, rough around the edges," more likely to turn out in blue jeans and flannel shirts than in Roman collars. "We're described as the lumberjacks," he said. "We do everything on a wing and a prayer. It's a make-it-up-as-you-go province."

Sometimes making it up as you go means setting the agenda for the rest. Seattle University was the first Jesuit school in the United States to admit women, and Bellarmine High School in Tacoma, Wash., was the first Jesuit high school to go coed, he said. The Jesuits in the Northwest rely more than the rest on lay people to staff parishes, to head up Jesuit schools, to direct the Jesuit retirement house.

"It's a different environment here," he said, "which is probably why writing mystery novels is OK."

Part of the fun in the Mark Townsend mysteries, Reynolds said, is expressing "the mind of a Jesuit" for readers who might have little experience of priests.

And part of it, too, is introducing readers to settings he knows well -- the Northwest from Oregon to Alaska where, if he could have any job he wanted, he'd be working as a missionary, he said.

Reynolds' first two novel was an excuse of sorts for the nine-month sabbatical he asked for and got in 1992 before leaving a seven-year post as vocations director and becoming the provincial's "alter ego," as he describes his present work. "People would ask me what I planned to do while I was on sabbatical. I said I was going to write a book. No one asked me what kind of book. I don't think anyone suspected -- I don't think I even did -- that it would be a mystery novel. I thought maybe I'd write a memoir or an extended essay about Jesuits and Eskimos."

In fact, he was doing just that when one day in downtown Seattle, near where Interstate 5 dumps cars onto Union Street, creating a deafening urban roar, Reynolds looked up at the glass elevators of the Washington State Convention and Trade Center and had a not particularly priestly thought. How, he wondered, could you kill somebody in a glass elevator and get away with it? "I thought and thought about it." A genre was evoked. He began reading every mystery set in the Northwest he could get his hands on -- Alaskan tales by Sue Henry, Dana Stabenow, John Straley and others -- as well as mysteries with religious contexts.