Winter 2027 – Annet Hatzistamou – Muder in paris ’68: a true story of death and glamour

The Markovic affair had everything: a dead body, a film star, gangsters, politicians, and a country still reinventing itself after the Second World War. In the late 1960s, when France seemed to embody glamour almost effortlessly, the murder of Stevan Markovic exposed a far less polished world beneath it. More than half a century later, Edward Chisholm returns to that world in Murder in Paris ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour.

What if the man once described as the most handsome man in the world had something to do with a murder? The possibility draws us towards Alain Delon, just as his celebrity drew attention to the original affair. In 1968, Markovic, a Serb immigrant living in Delon’s Paris household, was found dead beside a road near Versailles. His relationship with the actor occupied an uncertain space between friendship and employment. The investigation reaches into a world of Corsican and Yugoslav gangsters, film stars, and political figures.

Delon’s fame still provides an irresistible opening into the story. But what interests me about Chisholm’s account is the way he uses that attraction to direct attention towards Markovic: the man trying to enter a world that Delon already embodied. The glamour matters because Markovic wanted a place within it. Chisholm reconstructs that desire through scenes and gestures that give the affair the intimacy of fiction. A persuasive portrait can make someone seem understood, even if the evidence is incomplete. This gives Markovic a life beyond the murder, although it also raises a question about the risk of a glamorous portrait undermining the severity of the affair.

Earlier this year, I discovered A Waiter in Paris, Chisholm’s debut memoir. I read the book while on holiday in a small Italian village, a trip paid for by my own waitressing job. Its characters, or rather, its people, feel extraordinarily real. The book offers a pair of eyes into an underbelly of Paris that diners are rarely expected to notice. People become characters; restaurants become settings; smells, tastes, and tensions recur with a sense of narrative purpose.

Moving from a memoir of events he experienced to a history he could never have witnessed, Chisholm puts his talent for characterisation to a different test in Murder in Paris ’68. This time, the intimacy he creates must be assembled from documents, testimonies, and his own decisions about how to arrange them. He first became acquainted with the affair while browsing old newspaper clippings at the Bibliothèque des Littératures Policières, a Paris library dedicated to crime and detective literature. Roughly ten years later, that fascination resulted in a book.

In his author’s note, Chisholm cites an historian’s estimate that the Markovic affair produced roughly five tons of documentation: newspaper reports, police and intelligence records, contradictory testimonies, and biographies.

What interests me here is not simply the impressive amount of research, but the inevitable act of selection. Five tons of evidence eventually has to become a book made of scenes, characters, and causal relationships. These decisions are not merely practical. By deciding which episodes to stage and which contradictions to foreground, Chisholm also determines what kind of people Delon and Markovic appear to have been, and how much certainty the reader is invited to feel about them.

That act of selection becomes visible in the way Chisholm introduces Delon. One of the book’s earliest scenes takes place on the set of La Piscine. A director calls instruction into a late-summer evening; the crew falls silent; Delon appears first through the filmcamera. He is still, tanned, young and, above all, beautiful.

Here Chisholm’s screenwriting background becomes especially visible. There is suspense, visual composition, controlled gestures, and careful scene setting. His prose often feels like information being reported rather than a sequence being staged. Screenwriting seems to provide one of the mechanisms via which archival evidence is brought into action. We encounter Delon through the attention he commands, experiencing something of the fascination that made him so central to the original scandal.

Markovic’s introduction to this world depends on a different kind of looking. While living in Alain and Nathalie Delon’s household, he initially “plays his part”: he is “discreet, courteous, and always ready to help.” Nervous about his accent, he withdraws when their friends arrive, apparently reading while listening closely to their conversations. Gradually, Chisholm writes, he begins collecting “a gesture, a turn of phrase and the Parisian pronunciation,” eventually trying them out himself.

For a small passage, it performs a considerable amount of character work. Markovic is not simply described as ambitious or insecure:we watch those qualities take shape through behaviour. Listening becomes observation, observation becomes imitation, and imitation suggests a young immigrant consciously teaching himself how to belong to a world that remains slightly beyond his reach. Delon commands attention almost without effort. Markovic studies the people around him, trying to acquire what they seem to already possess.

The contrast makes their unequal positions tangible. The glamour is no longer merely a backdrop of film sets, nightclubs, expensive cars, and parties. In the gesture and pronunciation Markovic mimics, we see both its appeal and the effort required to find a place within it. Chisholm gives him what the phrase “the Markovic affair” cannot: desires that existed before his murder made him historically significant.

Yet the passage also demonstrates the delicate authority involved in this kind of nonfiction. The individual gestures may originate in testimony or documentary evidence, but their arrangement produces something more coherent: a character arc. Facts become personality through selection. Markovic’s desire to belong seems almost immediately understandable, yet the same fluency makes it difficult to distinguish how much of this apparent inner life is directly supported by testimony and how much of it is inferred. A familiar story of ambition and imitation can help us recognise Markovic, but it can also make him seem too easily explained.

Chisholm acknowledges this tension himself. In the author’s note, he explains that some scene-level details have been reconstructed for the purpose of the narration, while insisting that his “informed judgement” remains rooted in the available evidence and in the psychology of those involved. Where the archives leave gaps, chronology and material have occasionally been shaped in order tosustain the narrative. His account of that process makes visible something the scenes themselves can conceal: the intimacy of creative nonfiction is constructed through interpretation, even when its materials are factual.

I kept returning to one of the book’s final statements. Reflecting on the ambiguity of the relationship between Delon and Markovic, and on the ways the pair have been portrayed in previous accounts, Chisholm writes: “The vision I’ve written feels closer to the truth.”

The word “feels” seems particularly significant here. Much of the evidence surrounding the affair is itself mediated through testimony, police investigations, newspapers, and people with their own reasons to distort events. No writer can know with certainty what happened in private between the central figures. Chisholm’s version may feel “closer” because it makes their relationship psychologically intelligible: Markovic’s actions appear to emerge from desires we can recognise. This is precisely where his literary skill becomes difficult to disentangle from his authority, when a convincing portrait can begin to feel like confirmed knowledge.

The issue becomes more complicated because Murder in Paris’ 68 is enormously pleasurable to read. Its world already contains almost everything a crime writer might otherwise have to invent: Alain Delon, expensive cars, nightclubs, organised crime, beautiful people, political intrigue, and an unsolved murder. Even the subtle promises of both “death” and “glamour.”

Chisholm therefore faces an awkward task. To remove the glamour altogether would be to falsify part of what attracted people such as Markovic to this world in the first place. Yet to indulge it too freely risks allowing the murder to become another seductive component of the atmosphere. His task is to preserve that attraction while keeping its unequal terms in view. Markovic’s proximity to Delon gives him access but the effort he puts into fitting in suggests how uncertain his place remains.

His treatment of violence offers another way of negotiating that tension. When the book reaches the material reality of Markovic’s death, the prose becomes more restrained, drawing on the clinical vocabulary of investigators and forensic evidence rather than attempting to make the corpse itself cinematic. Elsewhere, Chisholm allows the excitement of this milieu to survive. The distinction seems deliberate: the world may be glamorous without the murder becoming glamorous.

Whether that separation can ever be complete is harder to answer. The same narrative techniques that restore emotional life to Markovic also make his trajectory compelling to follow. Suspense, characterisation, and scene construction inevitably give shape, and therefore a kind of aesthetic satisfaction, to events whose reality was chaotic and brutal. Even restoring his individuality requires interpretation. But the close attention to his behaviour gives that pleasure a different focus: we begin to notice the person at the edge of the glamorous scene, and the work he does to remain there.

Murder in Paris ’68 is most convincing when it holds these two ways of seeing together. Delon appears through a camera; Markovic listens from the edge of a room. One man embodies the glamour; the other is attempting to access it. Those scenes give the glamour a precise role in the story. It is the attraction that draws Markovic in and the measure of a distance he is still trying to cross.

Chisholm does not settle the murder by making that distance visible. He does, however, change what we attend to within an affair introduced through Delon’s name. If his account feels “closer to the truth,” its strongest claim lies here: It makes Markovic’s life matter, before his death becomes a celebrity mystery. The uncertainty about how fully we can know him remains, what becomes harder to overlook is how much effort it took for him to occupy even the margins of the world that makes his murder so readable.

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