If you’re interested in baseball, you’re interested in Bill James — he’s the inventor of sabermetrics, the ideological engine behind Michael Lewis’ best-selling Moneyball, and the sport’s most influential writer and historian of the past 25 years. But you know what Bill James is interested in? Murderers. He’s interested in crime, the people who commit them, and — perhaps most tellingly — the people who write about them.

Over the span of his 62 years, James has read (by his own estimate) more than 1,000 books on the subject of crime and spent countless hours trying to figure out what they really mean; he’s tried to understand both the nature of the criminal mind and the meaning of society’s relationship with acts of the unspeakable. Now, after decades of unconscious research, James has written Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence. It’s a fascinating, comprehensive, deeply strange book (it dissects crime literature as much as it dissects crime, sometimes seeming like the most intense 10th grade book report the world has ever seen).