When a corpse with its head stoved in was found on October 1, 1968, in a southwestern suburb of Paris, police investigators initially believed it was just another settling of scores between vagrants. But two things seemed at odds with this theory: the victim’s fingernails were neatly manicured, while his clothes were expensive and English-made. The next day, a fingerprint match identified the deceased as one Stevan Marković, a 31-year-old “political refugee” from Yugoslavia with a lengthy criminal record, whose last registered home address, in Paris’s Eighth Arrondissement, was that of the French film star Alain Delon, whom he became close with after working as his stand-in on the 1966 film Paris Brûle-t-Il?
When Delon was brought in for questioning soon afterward and asked to examine photographs of the corpse, he identified not only Marković but also the clothes he was wearing as ones Delon had lent him. In Murder in Paris ’68: A True Story of Death and Glamour, the English writer Edward Chisholm homes in on such sartorial details to conjure a disturbingly Ripley-esque account of a murder that roiled France’s Fifth Republic. Chisholm’s is the first comprehensive English-language account of what became known as the Marković Affair, and it reads like an icy, existential thriller that Delon, who died in 2024, might have been proud to star in, and in a sense did.