I have less than 200 pages left in Martin Edwards' The Life of Crime. (622 pages of text plus ~100 in indices.) It's fascinating how the lives of writers and their writings intersect with the lives of other writers and their writings, often in terms of Y, who wrote the screenplay for X's novel adaptation. This is, essentially, a lifetime project. Edwards as reader of mysteries pulling together all he's learned with further study and research and compiling a bulky compendium of mystery/crime story facts. I'm impressed how he keeps it flowing through introducing a particular writer who stands for the subject of the chapter and then moving out from that writer to others as well as the works that somehow epitomize the subject. I'm intrigued that throughout he is in conversation with a ~50 year-old book on the history of mystery, Bloody Murder by Julian Symons. And I'm amused that here is another example of a genre writer infuriated with Edmund Wilson, who the mainstream reader and critic may not even know much about anymore, but genre readers are still bruised over his 70+ year-old rebukes of the mystery genre, Lovecraft and Tolkein.