Death of a Dictator

The Mysterious Execution of Benito Mussolini
The question of who killed Mussolini is Italy's JFK: the riddle at the heart of national myth. Former Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate investigates

April 1945. On a quiet stretch of lakeside road, exhausted, abandoned, fleeing into the Alps as the last remnant of his empire collapses behind him, the original fascist dictator is shot dead. A young woman falls beside him, though he pleaded with her to run. Not, as it happens, his wife, but Claretta, his most devoted mistress.

That isn't the only scandalous detail about his death. Mussolini was reportedly travelling with a case of secret documents and a fortune in gold bars. Both vanish, into the hills and into legend. What plans did he have for those, or indeed for the few thousand loyalists who had followed him out of Milan? A desperate last stand? A sharp exit? And of all the forces converging on that road - partisans, Communists, American agents, his own dwindling band of the faithful - who actually pulled the trigger?

These questions have obsessed historians and conspiracy theorists for decades. Though barely discussed in English, Mussolini's death is Italy's JFK assassination: a national enigma it cannot escape, a paranoid mythology that has helped to fuel a resurrected far right. In his non-fiction debut, former Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate picks through a mass of contradictory clues, arriving at a conclusion that will transform how we see the end of Fascism and one of the last great unsolved mysteries of the Second World War. Death of a Dictator is a true historical whodunnit, whose subject has never stayed dead and buried for long.

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