Dorothy L. Sayers

Death in particular seems to provide the minds of the Anglo-Saxon race with a greater fund of innocent amusement than any other single subject.

Quoted  by P.D. James in TalkingaboutDetectiveFiction (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, Toronto, 2009, p. 3.)  

and  P.D.James goes on to comment:

 . . . to judge by the world-wide success of Arthur Conan Doyles’s Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie’s Poirot, it is not only the  Anglo-Saxons who have an appetite for mystery and mayhem.  It seems that this vicarious enjoyment in “murder considered as a fine art,” to quote Thomas DeQuincey,  makes the whole world kin.

Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say, in  The Sign of Four:

Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism , which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.

What do you say?