MURDER IN PARIS ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour, by Edward Chisholm
When the film star Alain Delon died at the age of 88, in 2024, President Emmanuel Macron hailed him as “a French monument.” For the mercurial actor, who first shot to fame playing the shape-shifting lead in “Purple Noon,” the 1960 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” a more apt comparison might be a sphinx, rather than some male version of the noble Marianne.
During his 1960s heyday, Delon was as renowned for his ravishing beauty as for his inscrutable, almost viper-like coldness. That double hit of attraction and danger made him the ideal casting choice for murderers, assassins and sun-tanned playboys. It also burnished his reputation as an icon of the decadent French New Wave.
Younger audiences seduced by Delon’s looks and style might be unaware that there was something else for which the actor was renowned: his involvement in a real-life murder whose fallout was so explosive that it threatened the powerful sectors of French cinema, the Parisian criminal underworld and even the French presidency.
Edward Chisholm’s riveting and disturbingly fun “Murder in Paris ’68” digs into this lurid murder mystery with an exciting, youthful insouciance rare in the staid true-crime genre. The British writer’s first book, “A Waiter in Paris,” chronicled his years grinding out a living in restaurants, showcasing a talent for depicting the dark underbelly of an over-polished City of Light. Chisholm puts that skill to great effect here, poking holes in the image of the irresistible film star, once dubbed “the most beautiful man in the world.”
The book opens in October 1968, with the discovery of a plastic-wrapped body on a roadside outside Paris. The victim is identified as Stevan Markovic, a 31-year-old Yugoslav with a criminal record, whose last registered address happens to have been Delon’s Rive Droite mansion.
Markovic, it turns out, is more than a mere acquaintance: He’s Delon’s shadow, bodyguard, lackey and, on set, his frequent doublure, or stand-in. At the time of the murder, Delon was shooting Jacques Deray’s sun-dappled thriller “La Piscine” in St. Tropez, providing a solid alibi. But soon Markovic’s brother appears with a letter the victim wrote, saying that if anything were to happen to him, “speak to Alain Delon, as the one 10,000 percent responsible.”
The police gather possible motives as to why the famous actor might have wanted to kill his double. Was Delon jealous over Markovic’s dalliance with his wife, the actress and model Nathalie Delon? Was Markovic, who had a tempestuous relationship with his employer, trying to blackmail the actor with secret photographs taken during high-society orgies (which may have also featured the first lady of France)? Or was the murder an attempt to hide a more intimate relationship between the two men?
Chisholm does an impressive job of breathing fresh life into a 60-year-old unsolved murder case. He writes in first person, often in short, staccato sentences like a noir-detective narrator. (“Delon had that effect — on men, on women. A beauty that threw people off balance. Made them do things.”) He’s particularly strong on evocative descriptions, for example envisioning police headquarters as “six stories of paperwork, parquet floors and cigarette smoke.” His own investigations — and astute asides — lend the narrative a present-day pulse.
But the electrifying brilliance of “Murder in Paris ’68” isn’t merely the whodunit of a celebrity crime story. Chisholm uses the murder as a launchpad to capture the radically changing society of 1960s France, as it moved from de Gaulle’s postwar stoicism into the hedonistic, materialistic modern era.
We hop from the bedroom of the prime minister and his wife to the student protests at the Sorbonne, from Riviera film sets to the crime dens of the notorious French mob, Le Milieu. Above all, we get a vivid panorama of Paris, which, Chisholm notes, at that moment had “more cinema screens than any other city in the world.”
At the heart of the book is the double-helix biography of two very similar men: both outsiders, roughly the same age, who shake off their tough childhoods and crawl their way to the bright lights of Paris. One becomes a god. The other is beaten, shot and dumped in a ditch.
It doesn’t take long, in Chisholm’s dark chronicle, to grow disgusted by Delon’s cruelty and vindictiveness, just as we increasingly empathize with the desperate, misguided Markovic.
Early on, the police compare the two men. “One plays criminals. The other, according to his record, is one,” writes Chisholm.
By the book’s end, you’re not so sure about this distinction.
MURDER IN PARIS ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour | By Edward Chisholm | Pegasus | 406 pp. | $32