Charles Kelly’s love of stories began early. He grew up on a farm in southeastern Nebraska and attended a one-room rural school, where he read every book in the corner book case and asked for more.

After graduating from Creighton University, he served in the U.S. Army as a military policeman in San Francisco, then obtained a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Kelly worked as a reporter for more than 35 years, first at The Omaha World-Herald, then at The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, where his stories included an investigation into the bomb murder of fellow reporter Don Bolles.

On the side, Kelly wrote the novels Pay Here and Grace Humiston and the Vanishing, a finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, as well as Gunshots in Another Room: The Forgotten Life of Dan J. Marlowe, a biography of an amnesiac hardboiled author. TV writer/producer Lee Goldberg, who has scripted Diagnosis: Murder, Monk, Hunter and Spenser: For Hire praised the work. Goldberg said: “What really sets this book apart from most literary biographies is the tight, novelistic approach he’s taken to telling not only Marlowe’s strange story, but also the tale of bank robber Al Nussbaum, who became Marlowe’s collaborator.”

When not applying his writing skills to Legacy biographies, Kelly enjoys playing basketball, toying with electronic gadgets and watching film noir.