They’ve already had snow in Iowa and up in Connecticut the leaves, so recently an eye-watering loveliness of orange, yellow, and red, are barren, looking for all the world like the deathscape of a dystopian universe.Winter is not yet officially here, but we know it’s coming when the clocks get set back and it’s dark when we get out of work. The anticipation of that foulest of seasons is almost worse than the actuality, as I imagine placing a neck on the guillotine must be.

Thanksgiving Day, that glorious American celebration, occurs in November, which saves it from being entirely depressing, and some of the many things for which we may be thankful are the outstanding mystery writers born in this month.

The greatest writer of locked-room mysteries and impossible crimes was John Dickson Carr, whose bottom was slapped on November 30, 1906. His Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale mysteries (the latter written using the Carter Dickson pseudonym) remain the high point of the puzzle story, the standard against which all others must be held.

Rooms barred and sealed with tape. Surrounded by police. No secret doors or panels. Windows nailed shut. A scream. Rush to the door, unlock it or break it down. Th`e victim stabbed to death, or strangled! Impossible.

Carr did it scores of times and, in “The Three Coffins,” had his detective give a lecture offering dozens of methods that a murderer might use to achieve the seemingly impossible trick – more plot devices than virtually every other writer of detective stories could conceive in a lifetime.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John P. Marquand, (born November 10, 1893), mainly recognized for his novels of social ambition, despised his books about Mr.Moto,though the little Japanese detective and secret agent was much loved by readers and moviegoers. There were six Moto novels, beginning with “No Hero” in 1935, and Peter Lorre played him in eight films between 1937 and 1939. Increased American feelings against Japan ended the books and movies, but Marquand brought him back once more, in “Stopover: Tokyo” in 1957, though he was eliminated from the film version.

November was a good month for other thriller writers. John Gardner (November 29, 1926), now most remembered for having taken over the writing of the James Bond novels after Ian Fleming’s death, actually produced more adventures about 007 than the character’s creator did.

What he should be best known for, however, are his brilliant espionage novels involving Big Herbie Kruger. I still maintain that the greatest spy story I’ve ever read is “The Garden of Weapons” (closely followed by Charles McCarry’s “The Tears of Autumn” and John le Carre’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”), which is sadly out of print.

Many years ago, my little publishing house, the Mysterious Press, was distributed by Farrar,Straus & Giroux.The good folks there suggested that I start a paperback line to complement my hardcover list. The very first book I put into that line was “The Garden of Weapons.”

After Warner bought the Mysterious Press, I started a new imprint at Scribner, and the first novel to appear was Mr. Gardner’s “Maestro,” a giant multigenerational thriller that the author describes as his finest work. He’s wrong, because “The Garden of Weapons” is, but “Maestro” is good enough that we shouldn’t quibble.

Martin Cruz Smith (November 3, 1942) is one of the few contemporary thriller writers who manages the holy trinity of outstanding fiction: great story, serious research introduced in a nonboring manner, and an enticing style that makes it impossible to stop reading.

He got lucky when “Gorky Park” was made into an excellent film, but then it would have taken an extraordinary effort to turn that splendid best seller into a bad one. Not that Hollywood isn’t capable of it, mind you. When one sees good books turned into films as bad as “The Big Bounce” and “A Kiss Before Dying,” you know there’s someone in charge who is so inept he couldn’t sell Windex to a Peeping Tom.

Arguably the worst mystery writer ever to assault a piece of paper with his pen was Harry Stephen Keeler, whose mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork. He was born on November 3, 1890, a dark and stormy date in the history of mystery fiction. How bad was he? Unlike Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I cannot count the ways.

Let me give you a mere taste of his work, of which a New York Times reviewer stated: “All [his] novels are written in Choctaw”:

He turned back in the direction he had come, and walking rapidly eastward soon passed under the same viaduct from which he had descended a short time before, and Chinatown now lay in his rear.

I don’t want nobody bazooing to drown out his approach. For I want him safe in beyond all three doors and beyond yonder bolt – so’s I can be putting that rod on his spine and letting him know it’s a snatch.

They don’t write ’em like that anymore.

Happily, November produced a large number of writers of vastly superior talent, including Vera Caspary (November 13, 1904), author of “Laura”; W.R. Burnett (November 25, 1899), creator of such book and film classics as “Little Caesar,” “High Sierra,” and “The Asphalt Jungle”; the great pulp writers Raoul Whitfield (November 22, 1898) and Frederick Nebel (November 3, 1903); and espionage writers William F. Buckley (November 24, 1925) whose outstanding novels about Blackford Oakes mix fact with fiction, and Geoffrey Household (November 30, 1900), whose chase thriller “Rogue Male” was the basis for the Fritz Lang classic “Man Hunt.”

Finally, Anna Katharine Green (November 11, 1846) is frequently, inaccurately, described as the mother of the detective novel by virtue of having written “The Leavenworth Case,” which is said to be the first mystery written by an American woman. But the honor rightfully belongs to Seeley Regester, with her 1866 novel “The Dead Letter.”

So instead of turning morose in November, there’s the bright side. You can read of violent death, betrayal, and terror in a room in which you’ve turned up the heat to the same temperature that sends you to the air conditioner in the summer.

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.