Darryl Levings is a Missouri native, whose great uncle, Flavius Shortridge, rode with Colonel Porter and died in the Alton prison camp for it. Darryl joined the Yankee Air Force and served in Northwest Pakistan. Misdirected from further NSA work just in time, he gained two degrees and a wife at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where his feelings toward Kansas jelled nicely.

Over his 40 years at The Kansas City Star, Darryl has been Jefferson City correspondent, city editor, national editor, war editor, business editor, and when he retired last spring was editor and senior writer in the FYI department, which gave him wide access to the now-closed Sunday Star Magazine. His stories there delved deeply into topics from oysters to magicians, but history was always his seductive muse.

Editing many nationally awarded projects, he shared a piece of the Pulitzer prize for the coverage of the Hyatt hotel disaster, which he reported in part from the last hanging skywalk. 

He edited a month-long newspaper series on the Oregon Trail, and similarly in 2011 directed the newspaper’s Civil War coverage, both re-published as Star books. About the same time, he finished "Saddle the Pale Horse," a historical novel (he preferred "novel history" but his editors didn't buy it) about the Price raid of 1864 and Battle of Westport. 

Currently, he is laboring in the mines of fiction, a three-story collection of murder mysteries solved by a very real Kansas City policeman, Lafayette Alonzo Tillman, the only African American on the force in 1904.