As T.S. Eliot so famously wrote, “April is the cruelest month.” Maybe it’s true. If I knew what that meant, I could cogently argue for or against it. What I do know is that numerous volumes have been filled with cruelty (can anything be much crueler than the taking of another person’s life?) by authors who were born in this fresh and dawning month, as spring truly begins. And while I would love spring truly to begin when the calendar proclaims it, on March 20, it really starts when daylight-saving time goes into effect, if you ask me. Yes, I know you didn’t ask me. I’m just saying …

Few authors took as much glee in witnessing cruelty as Robert Bloch, who was born April 5, 1917. Although his prolific career encompassed a half-century of work in the novel form, short stories, screenplays, teleplays, and essays, he will probably be most remembered for the motion picture made from his shocking novel, “Psycho.”

Wrongly referred to as “Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho'” by most fans of the film, the great director followed the novel very closely and received a bit too much credit. One of the most heartstopping moments in the history of the cinema is the shower scene in which the biggest star of the film is murdered. The screeching violins and slashing knife became so iconic that women frequently told Bloch that they were afraid to shower for months after seeing the movie. He replied that he was glad he hadn’t set the scene on the toilet. His many crime and horror tales prompted an interviewer to ask if he himself had a dark and murderous side. On the contrary, he said. “I have the heart of a small boy.” He smiled and added, “It’s in a jar, on my desk.”

One of the most influential writers of the past quarter-century is Sue Grafton, born April 24, 1940. While there have always been an enormous number of women mystery writers, and a large number of female detectives, it was Ms. Grafton who popularized the notion of a semi-tough, independent, female private eye who could think for herself, had a sex life, and didn’t need a macho guy to pull her buns out of the fire.

Kinsey Millhone has now starred in 19 novels and remains a fixture on the best-seller list.The success of the series has inspired countless women to write books that imitate Ms. Grafton’s series: some good, some ordinary, and some as insipid as any television program on the WB network.You know – like male mystery writers.

The now largely forgotten Edgar Wallace was born on April Fool’s Day, 1875.The author of more than 100 mystery novels and short story collections, dozens of which were filmed, Wallace was by far the world’s most successful writer between the world wars. All one needs to know is that for more than decade, one of every four works of fiction sold in Britain was written by Wallace – a level of mass acceptance unmatched by Dan Brown, James Patterson or, in fact, the dozen top-selling writers in the world combined.

He also wrote a treatment for a film that enjoyed a bit of success over the years: “King Kong.”

The only pure detective character to challenge Sherlock Holmes in popularity from the teens to the 1930s was R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke. Born April 11, 1862, Freeman’s stories, so meticulously plotted and laboriously explained, are masterpieces of logic and deduction – and are so excrutiatingly dull that a clever marketeer could get copies distributed to drugstores as a competitor to Ambien.

Most of Jacques Futrelle’s fiction is undistinguished, but he did write one of the most brilliant crime stories of all time, “The Problem of Cell 13.” In what is perhaps the most frequently anthologized mystery story ever written, a Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, better known as the Thinking Machine, escapes from an apparently foolproof jail.

It might be easy to skip Futrelle (April 8, 1875) in a brief column, but he should be remembered for being on the Titanic’s tragic voyage that ended cruelly on April 15, 1912, the week after his 37th birthday. He rescued several passengers and finally succumbed to the frigid sea while saving his wife. If this case of heroism seems counterintuitive, given the name, it should be pointed out that Jacques Futrelle was not French but American, born in Pike County, Ga.

While I’m on the subject of ancient history in the world of mystery fiction, I should mention Melville Davisson Post (April 19, 1869), the creator of what were once two of America’s most popular short story characters, Uncle Abner and Randolph Mason. Abner dispensed justice in the backwoods of 19th-century America, carrying a Bible and speaking like Abraham Lincoln, whom he physically resembled. Mason was a lawyer who had one goal, and only one, when he took a case: to free his client. His position was that if the law did not specifically prohibit an activity, it was by definition legal, so he was able to acquit even the most heinous characters by finding loopholes in an imperfect set of laws – once even advising a client to commit murder.

Post’s stories famously were responsible for the rewriting of several laws to close those loopholes. Many years after the stories were published, Erle Stanley Gardner used the character’s last name for his own lawyer detective, Perry Mason.

Real-life lawyers who have made an impact in the mystery world and were born this month are John Mortimer (April 21, 1923), creator of the disrespectful and rumpled Horace Rumpole of the Bailey, and one of the most literary crime novelists of our time, the brilliant and moral Scott Turow (April 12, 1949), whose “Presumed Innocent” stands with “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Anatomy of a Murder” as a masterpiece of courtroom fiction.

April may be the cruelest month, but take heart. Next month May be better.

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.