Edmund Lester Pearson (1880-1937), born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard, worked as a librarian at both the Washington D.C. Public Library as well as the New York Public Library, before beginning a career as a writer. After publishing several volumes of essays and memoirs, in 1924, he published his best-known work, Studies in Murder, with its signature essay on Lizzie Borden of Fall River.

In the years to follow, Pearson published other studies on American criminal cases, including Murder at Smutty Nose and Other Murders and Five Murders although these had limited popularity in comparison to his first landmark work on American crime. He maintained an extensive personal correspondence with the Scottish crime writer, William Roughead