Although winter technically begins on December 21, that’s really just a calendar thing.The end of December isn’t winter – it’s the holiday season.

Christmas, Boxing Day, Chanukah, New Year’s Eve and Day, even Kwanzaa (which, let’s face it, most of us never heard of when we were growing up), and, now, thanks to “Seinfeld,” Festivus (which more than a few mouthbreathers are attempting to bring into the American mainstream), are all crowded into a week or so filled with so much activity and gaiety that we forget how miserable the weather is. Which, I might add, is how it should be. If weather is the most important thing in your life, you either have no life or you are a Californian.

But, ugh, after the last cork has popped and we begin to recover from the hangover, we are faced with the realization that we have a lot of very long, very dark, very cold days ahead of us. This dreaded annual sentence is called January, a word devoid of beauty, warmth, joy, and hope. Can we then be surprised that this bleakest of all months has witnessed the birth of violent crime in the minds of some people born in this gloomy and frigid time?

One of the most influential authors of police novels is Joseph Wambaugh, born January 22, 1937. There have always been policemen in crime stories, beginning with the largely fictional “Memoirs” of Vidocq, founder of the French Surete, the first organized police force.

The police who patrolled the novels of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Poe, Anna Katharine Green, and Doyle were generally either honest, hardworking officers of the law or blundering incompetents created to be foils for heroic private detectives or brilliant amateur sleuths. A few were corrupt, abetting criminal behavior by accepting money or power in exchange for a blind eye. Readers saw them at work, seldom even thinking they might have wives, children, parents, or mortgages.

Later, midway through the 20th century, Ed McBain popularized the police procedural, in which teams of police officers worked together in a more realistic way to solve crimes. It took Mr. Wambaugh, a longtime member of the Los Angeles Police Department who rose to the rank of detective sergeant, to write an entirely different kind of cop novel.

Beginning with “The New Centurions” in 1970 and continuing with “The Blue Knight” (1972), “Choirboys” (1975), and “The Black Marble” (1978), among others, Mr. Wambaugh realistically depicted the police as fully developed characters, neither perfect nor abhorrent, not always right nor always wrong, not always good nor always bad.

These are mostly cops who desperately love their jobs, the sense of doing good, but who have seen so much horrific behavior, so many inhuman acts of depravity, that they are not quite like other people; not like civilians. They are shown to deal with relentlessly shocking and deplorable behavior in many ways, most commonly humor. Some of Mr. Wambaugh’s police officers drink too much, engage in violent behavior, deliver foul-mouthed and racist dialogue, and, unable to handle the darkness they encounter so frequently as well as they might wish, commit suicide or go insane.

Never before had the police been shown to be so dramatically human, and scores of writers who followed, including James Ellroy, Robert Daley, and Michael Connelly, owe much to the grimly hilarious exploits of the people who populate Mr.Wambaugh’s fiction.

He also wrote one of the two books I wish I’d never read. “The Onion Field,” also a powerful film, is a true story of two cops who are surprised by and then kidnapped by a couple of petty crooks who kill one of them while the other escapes to a lifetime of nightmares. The fate of these two decent men who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, haunted me in the quiet of the night for months after I read it. (The other book, incidentally, and for the same reason, is Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” which chronicles the massacre of the Clutter family.)

If you want to talk about bleak, how about Patricia Highsmith, a birthday girl on January 19, 1921? The author of “Strangers on a Train” while still in her 20s, she never forgave Alfred Hitchcock for paying too little for the rights to her masterful suspense novel, presumably one of the many events in her life that turned her into a mean, unhappy, and bitter woman. She was an American who moved to France although she didn’t speak the language and actively detested the French.

A huge best seller in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, she enjoyed critical acclaim in the United States, but few sales. Her greatest career move was her death in 1995, after which her book sales soared, further enhanced by the success of the film made from “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

W. Somerset Maugham, born January 25, 1874, is frequently credited with inventing the modern spy story with his “Ashenden” in 1928. Largely based on his own experiences as an undercover agent in Russia and Switzerland during World War I, these understated adventures showed spycraft as it really was, stripped of the glamour and heroic “what-fun” attitude that dominated earlier tales of espionage.

Brian Garfield, a prolific writer of Westerns (“Wild Times”), adventure (“The Paladin, “Death Wish”), and espionage fiction (“Hopscotch”) was born on January 26, 1939. After averaging more than two books a year in the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Garfield moved to Hollywood to write and co-produce the film version of 1981’s “Hopscotch,” and has published very little fiction since.

That Edgar-winning novel was a suspenseful look at the CIA, but one screenplay after another failed until Mr. Garfield decided the film should be turned into a comedy, after which it became a success, with Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson starring.

These authors are one reason not to hate January. The only other one I can think of is that this is the month in which you are in the lowest tax bracket you’ll be in all year.

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 openzler@nysun.com.