So I’m looking out the window of my office and the pink blossoms on the crab apple tree fill the frame. The window is open and the sweetest soft breeze gently lifts some papers on my desk. The variety of birds singing could send Roger Tory Peterson into paroxysms of ecstasy. I have to ask myself: What is it about the happy, optimistic, and lovely month of May that would compel so many people of such singular talent to decide that their life’s work should be killing people (albeit in fiction form)?

Although we long ago established that April is the cruelest month (unless you’re a fan of the Chicago Cubs, in which case September wins hands down), May is no slouch when it comes to producing crime and mystery writers capable of dispatching victims by the carload.

Arguably the greatest of all authors of detective fiction is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He was born May 22, 1859 and authored four novels and 56 stories about unarguably the greatest detective who ever lived, Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle attended medical school where a teacher, Dr. Joseph Bell, be came a model for the world’s first consulting detective with his astonishing (to his students) ability to observe patients and deduce apparently unknowable facts about them, a skill for which Holmes also was famous.

The doctor thing didn’t work out very well for Doyle, who had so much free time between patients that he filled the empty hours by writing stories. One of them,”A Study in Scarlet,” introduced Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson to the world. It was published in a Beeton’s Christmas Annual magazine in 1887, and then all rights were sold to a book publisher for the lessthan-princely sum of 25 pounds.

The second Holmes novel, “The Sign of Four,”did not appear for three years. It may never have been written but for a serendipitous dinner invitation by the publisher of the American magazine, Lippincott’s, which was planning to launch in Britain. Also invited to the dinner was a young Oscar Wilde, and both authors were invited to write a short novel for the new publishing enterprise. Doyle produced a new Holmes novel and Wilde gave him “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” so presumably the publisher’s expense account was approved without difficulty.

While Holmes is the most famous detective in recorded history, the most famous spy is, of course, James Bond, and his creator, Ian Fleming, was born 100 years ago this month (May 28).

It would be dangerous and foolhardy to attempt to draw too close a parallel between Fleming and his creation, but there are several similarities that even an idiot in a hurry could not fail to see. Like Bond, Fleming was a spy, as well as a full Commander in the Royal Navy, though his exploits were somewhat less colorful and, as far as is known, never involved saving the world from domination by a grotesque evil genius.

There were also many women in the lives of both men.In the formulaic Bond films, there were usually two prominent women, “Bond Girls,” both gorgeous and pliant. Unfortunately, one of them always died, while the other fell into Bond’s arms at the end of the adventure. As far as has been reported, there was no dramatic increase in the mortality rate of Fleming’s many conquests.

Fleming did not have the happiest life, raised in a family without affection. This is reflected in his novels, none of which feature characters to whom a reader could warm – including 007 himself. The novels, largely ignored in America until President Kennedy lavished praise on them, are noticeably darker than the films, with more graphic violence. The author thought his books trivial during most of his career until, near the end, he began to defend them against critics. At the height of “Bond-mania,” Fleming died, aged 56, having produced the greatest phenomenon in crime fiction since the sensational popularity of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

It is possible to make the case that the most important American mystery writer since Edgar Allan Poe was Dashiell Hammett, who was born May 27, 1894. It is Hammett who popularized the hard-boiled private eye story, which had been created by the woefully untalented Carroll John Daly in the pages of “Black Mask” magazine.

Hammett also importantly introduced the notion of realism to detective fiction. Raymond Chandler admired this new course for mystery fiction. “Hammett,” he wrote, “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it in the alley.” Further, Chandler continued, he took it out of “the vicar’s rose garden and gave it back to the people who commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.”

The Continental Op, Nick and Nora Charles, Ned Beaumont, and, most famously, Sam Spade, all owe their birth to Hammett, and all the PI writers who followed owe their careers to him as well.

These giant figures merely scratch the surface of May’s legion of serial killers. Tony Hillerman, whose many novels about Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, Navajo policemen who raised the entire country’s consciousness about Indians (and they laugh at you if you call them Native Americans), was born May 27, 1925 (sharing a birthday with Hammett).

Robert Ludlum, the most popular of all American espionage writers, had a May 25, 1927, birth date, his success not at all diminished by his death five years ago, as the new “Bourne” novels and movies attest.

The creator of “The Saint,” Leslie Charteris, was born in Singapore on May 12, 1907; Daphne du Maurier, author of the greatest romantic suspense novel ever written, “Rebecca,” was a birthday girl the very next day in the same year, May 13, 1907. G.K. Chesterton, the creator of Father Brown, was born May 29, 1874. More recently, the Boston writer of private eye novels about John Francis Cuddy, Jeremiah Healy, was born May 15, 1948.

I still don’t know what it is about May. Maybe it’s the carpenter ants that attack the house every spring, and those damn birds screeching right outside the window at 6 a.m. It’s enough to make anyone want to kill.

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.