Guy M. Townsend

Guy Townsend is the deputy prosecutor in Ripley County, Indiana, former publisher of The Mystery Fancier, and the co-author of Loose Coins, as well as two previous books. He lives in Madison, Indiana. He holds both a Ph.D. in British History and a Law degree. He has been a college professor, a newspaper bureau chief, staff writer and editor, associate editor of a national magazine, editor and publisher of a critical journal, and a professional magician. He recently retired as a prosecuting attorney rather than apologize for telling an incompetent judge what he thought of him in open court.

Guy Townsend grew up in Marianna, Arkansas, graduating from high school in 1961.

After earning a B.A., an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history and teaching for five years at colleges from Florida to South Dakota—with a year-long intermission as a historian in the Louisville office of the Corps of Engineers—Townsend got his first taste of the newspaper business as bureau chief for the Blytheville (Ark.) Courier News. He left the Courier to edit two newspapers in Indiana before returning to the Courier as a staff writer. After a brief stint as associate editor of Practical Horseman Magazine in West Chester, Pennsylvania, he returned to his wife's home state of Indiana and established Brownstone Books, a publishing house devoted to works of mystery-fiction criticism.

At age forty Townsend decided to become a prosecuting attorney, so he accepted an appointment as chief probation officer for Indiana's Fifth Judicial Circuit and a month later enrolled in the evening division at Chase College of Law, seventy-five miles away in Highland Heights, Kentucky. He completed the four-year course in three years and then ran for and was elected prosecuting attorney. He later served as deputy prosecutor in two other Indiana circuits and as assistant D.A. in two Tennessee circuits.

Finding retirement not to his liking, Townsend returned to the newspaper business in early 2003, when he and his wife purchased the Flemingsburg (Ky.) Gazette. They sold the paper at the end of 2006 and now reside in Berea, Kentucky.

In addition to scholarly articles, Townsend has written one novel (To Prove a Villain, 1985), co-written another (Loose Coins, 1998, with Joe L. Hensley), and edited a bibliography (Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1980). He also edited and published The Mystery Fancier, a journal of mystery-fiction criticism, from 1976 to 1992.