This week's historical thriller Inspector of the Dead by David Morrell (Mulholland Books) R305Morrel is the author of First Blood, the 1972 novel that spawned the vile Rambo movies. Last year, out of left field, he introduced a wholly different type of protagonist in Murder as a Fine Art, an excellent Victorian crime novel: Thomas de Quincey, the real-life laudanum addict who penned the 1821 memoir, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In this satisfying and well-researched sequel, set in 1855,De Quincey and his daughter, Emily, team up with Scotland Yard to foil a plot to assassinate, among others, Queen Victoria.The issueI enjoyed Ghaleb Cachalia's take on the Ruth First lecture at Wits University. Writing in City Press, he said the speakers and participants delivered "a shallow intellectual veneer to constructs that ignore and distort aspects of our past in a cathartic display of introspective victimhood aimed at the deliverance of a dose of dignity". It served as a welcome reminder of how boring the South African "debate" has become, while the "issues" remain all the more pressing or even depressing.But for a proper case of fiddling while Rome burns, why not turn to the real thing? Or at least, Tom Holland's Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar (Little, Brown), out next month. No other family - not the Zumas or even the Mandelas - can match the lurid glamour and blood-steeped mania of Dynasty's cast of murderers, thieves, adulterers, scheming matriarchs and simpering metrosexuals: Tiberius, Caligula, Agrippina and, of course, Nero himself. Fans of Game of Thrones may be interested to know that this is where George RR Martin got much of his raw material.Crash courseHe would have turned 95 last week - an anniversary that has sparked renewed interest in Charles Bukowski, American blue-collar poet laureate, cult novelist and low-life literary lion. The first of "at least three" anthologies from Ecco/HarperCollins has just appeared, On Writing, edited by Abel Debritto. It's a selection of letters, rants and musings that, according to the New York Times, won't "disturb the broad contours of Bukowski's reputation, which have long since been established, whether to celebrate or vilify him". In other words, Chuck railing against mostly the whole literary world. "I kept writing not because I felt I was so good," he reveals, "but because I felt they were so bad, including Shakespeare, all those. The stilted formalism, like chewing cardboard."Bukowski's On Cats and On Love will appear in December and February, respectively. Meanwhile, City Lights has just released The Bell Tolls for No One, a collection of previously unpublished pulp fiction.Bottom line"There's something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?" - The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion by Tracy Daugherty (St Martin's Press)..