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Mitchell Rose and the Bologna Massacre is a crime story that explores the last fifty years of cross-fertilisation between the Italian criminal underworld, its secret services, politics and the judicial system.
When Mitchell Rose is called to Milan by Remo Rhimare, a local judge who wants him to investigate the Bologna bombing of 1980, he knows it would make more sense to turn the job down.
To make things even more complicated, Rhimare also wants Rose to rein in his errant daughter, who is becoming increasingly wayward.
As Rose begins to investigate, the two missions surprisingly become one, culminating in a dreadful dramatic climax.
Read an Excerpt
I twitched nervously. The will to move out of there and toward the action was strong. I wanted to be an integral part of the scene that I could see reflected there in the mobile phone. Alessandra raised a hand and made a gesture that encouraged me to stay put. In doing so, she touched me softly on the left shoulder with her long fingernails. Being discovered there would put me back to square one. Robuyuki was gonna get his from Cambio’s guards, but I had to stay still, I couldn’t move.
“It’s also my favourite drink.” The chef offered.
“But you don’t drink, Robuyuki.”
Robuyuki lifted the glass to his lips and forced the drink down his neck, licking his lips with satisfaction.
Cambio had been silenced and we heard the clumped, mechanical tramping of feet as they exited the restaurant. Alessandra heaved a sigh of relief and we slowly moved apart. I poured a glass of Grand Marnier into the glass that I had seized and we shared it there in the cellar. The sense of relief was overwhelming and we hugged each other, but without the intensity that there had been between us moments before. There was still a layer of fear that lay like a film across the room, and that fear had rendered us sexless siblings. Robuyuki knocked on the cellar door and we climbed back up and thanked him sincerely.
An Author’s interview question:
Who, out of your contemporaries, do you most admire and why?
I always regard that as a slightly odd question in that when I read 95% of published writers who are out there, I am always taken aback at the raw unadulterated novel writing talent that exists in the world. The same with poetry. If you take a copy of The Rialto or the Poetry Society’s publications and you start reading, the quantity of talented writers operating today is breath-taking. Then, someone asks you who your favourite writers are and you have to choose two or three, you can’t say I love everyone.
Contemporaries is a funny word because I would tend to say Martin Amis, John Niven, Will Self, Delillo, Stephen Markley, Eliza Clark writers who are working in genres that are worlds apart from mine and must be somewhat older than me (except Eliza). They are so experimental and creative continually pushing at the boundaries of what is allowed or not in the literary sphere, whereas what I have produced here is tight and controlled. I read a lot of Italian novels and I love Paolo Nori and Flavio Soriga.
I would like to think that in future I would be able to experiment as these writers do, be a little more creative. First, though, you need publications, recognition and a book deal. There’s a piece in The Information by Martin Amis where the unsuccessful writer and main character, Richard Tull, has written a scene in his -never to be seen- third novel that involves several of the characters moving through a revolving hotel door, while their mobile phones somehow cross lines and become interconnected. It’s written as an example of the type of narrative that no one would be interested in reading, a scene that would probably give a publisher a massive headache. Every time I look at it, I think well that sounds interesting. That’s the sort of thing I could have written that and had binned by multiple publishers. That’s me.
In fact, one time, I wrote a novel about three plumbers working in a bathroom and discussing the nature of language, grammar and phonetics, and whether language was learnt or taught. They end up on a mountain in north Sardinia toting pistols, eye gauging and re-enacting scenes from the third and fourth acts of King Lear. I thought it was a work of genius, but quite predictably a publisher was relatively hard to come by. My son pulled it out of the top drawer the other day and asked me what on earth I was going on about. He’s not a Shakespeare reader. If any publishers out there are interested…(lol)
I went back to Raymond Chandler recently as I was a little worried as to whether I had actually copied his style too directly in this novel. I think there is definitely something of his in this novel, but I’d like to think that I’m aping more the era than the writer. I had in mind all those 50s and 60s detective films, the private investigator is stylised, cryptic, pushing a door open with a gun in his hand, nudging forward. To some extent, it’s a childhood movie image that stayed with me and got reproduced here. As I said, I picked through the Chandler novels, afraid that I was going to discover that I had lifted whole sections, but luckily that wasn’t the case. I located a couple of phrases of mine that I had used in real life and reproduced, but thankfully that was the sum total of my plagiarism. I guess that outside of academia if you are quoting yourself, that’s kind of ok.
About the Author
Mark is a novelist, poet, translator and English teacher. He has lived in Cagliari, Italy for 33 years.
His poetry has been published in The UK Poetry Library’s Top Writers of 2012 and the Live Canon 2013 Prize Anthology. In 2016, one of his poems was commissioned, published and performed at The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for the anniversary of hakespeare’s death. In 2024, he was published by Pierian press, Dreichmag, Cerasus press and Southlight 36 edition. In 2025, he has been published in the Penumbra Journal of Literature, Rituals, Art at California State University Stanislaus, Book of Matches and And Other Poems.
He is the winner of the Azerate poetry prize and his debut poetry collection, “Death and the Insatiable” was published in September 2025. https://hiddenhandbooks.com/azerate-poetry-prize His first novel “Mitchell Rose and The Bologna Massacre” was published by Wallace Publishing in July 2025.
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