The literary critic, biographer, and naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch hit the old nail right on the noggin when he wrote that the most serious charge that can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.

Well, New York is not quite New England, but it is proximate enough, and its weather is foul enough, that we don’t need to quibble about precise boundaries of longitude and latitude. When the best thing one can say about a month is that it’s short, we know we aren’t comparing it to a walk on the beach at Waikiki. The second best thing that may be said about February is that it is the month in which some truly outstanding mystery writers first saw the light of day.

Ross Thomas, born on February 19, 1926, never became quite the household name he deserved to be. Among professionals, however, namely his fellow mystery writers, no one was held in higher esteem. “The Cold War Swap” won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Mystery of 1966; “Briarpatch” won as Best Mystery of the Year in 1985.

It seems that everyone who read Thomas’s work had a different favorite. His own was “Porkchoppers” (1972); mine is “Chinaman’s Chance” (1978), one of the greatest caper novels ever written. Since I am a pushover for memorable opening lines, let me quote for you the first paragraph of this smart, witty, understated masterpiece:

The pretender to the Emperor’s throne was a fat 37-year-old Chinaman named Artie Wu who always jogged along Malibu Beach right after dawn even in summer, when dawn came round as early as 4:42. It was while jogging along the beach just east of the Paradise Cove pier that he tripped over a dead pelican, fell, and met the man with six greyhounds. It was the 16th of June, a Thursday.

Is it possible to read this without wanting to continue? Happily, “Chinaman’s Chance” (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages, $14.95) has recently come back into print, so you can.This is one of my 10 favorite crime stories of the 20th century, so I urge you to get a copy immediately.

Len Deighton was also born in February, on the 18th, in 1929. As one of the foremost chroniclers of the Cold War, his name was invariably linked with John le Carre’s during the 1960s and 1970s as one of the two most distinguished espionage writers of the era, having produced such best sellers as “The Ipcress File” (1962), “Funeral in Berlin” (1964), and “Billion-Dollar Brain” (1966).

His antihero protagonist remained nameless in the novels but was christened Harry Palmer for the film versions, which starred Michael Caine. While thematically similar to Mr. le Carre’s work, Mr. Deighton’s spy is a working-class, blue-collar guy far lower on the economic scale than George Smiley and his circle. Stylistically, too, they are dissimilar, with Mr. Deighton’s novels clearly influenced by Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, given to heavy use of simile, lots of wisecracks, and dark humor.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the destruction of the Berlin Wall pretty much finished Mr. Deighton’s career. He tried setting later books in Guiyana (“Mamista,” 1991), Egypt (“City of Gold,” 1992), and Los Angeles (“Violent Ward,” 1993), but they were failures, both artistically and financially, and there have been no new books for the past decade.

One of the few mystery writers in history able to base a successful career almost exclusively on short stories is Edward D. Hoch, born on February 22, 1930. The amazingly inventive former president of the Mystery Writers of America has produced more than 900 stories, including at least one in every issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine since May 1973.

Named a grand master by MWA for lifetime achievement, he is one of the only authors still able to produce tales of pure detection, impossible crimes, and the other challenging staples of the genre that brought most readers to the mystery shelves in the first place.

Among his many long-running series characters are Nick Velvet, the thief who, for a large fee, steals only worthless objects (the water from a swimming pool, a toy mouse, a penny); Simon Ark, the detective who may be 2,000 years old; Captain Leopold, the tough but sensitive violent crime specialist in a large northeastern city; Rand, a cipher expert with British Intelligence; and Sam Hawthorne, a small-town doctor who, in the 1920s and 1930s, solves apparently impossible crimes.

Arthur Sarsfield Ward, better known as Sax Rohmer, was born on February 15, 1883. The creator of the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, the evil Chinese warlord intent on world conquest, Rohmer wrote adventure novels that thrilled readers for more than a half-century. He also once set out to write a perfect mystery story.

He began “Fire-Tongue” with no solution in mind and carefully wrote the first three chapters, providing every character with a flawless alibi. He achieved his goal so well that he could find no way to solve the mystery, causing him great difficulty in keeping up with the publication schedule of Collier’s magazine, which was serializing the novel.

According to Rohmer’s own account of the episode, he could do nothing but board an ocean liner to America and ask his friend Harry Houdini to get him out of the corner into which he had painted himself. The magician came up with an acceptable denouement, but Rohmer never tried this type of story again.

Elizabeth George, Adam Hall, Margaret Millar, Gregory McDonald, and pulp writer Frank Gruber are just a few of the other mystery writers born in February.

Winter isn’t over, but it is now possible to imagine that the light at the far end of the tunnel is visible. It may be rushing things a bit to say, as someone once did (if I remembered to give credit), that February is the month when winter’s back has been broken – after everybody else’s. Fortunately, time will March on.

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.