Alain Delon was by some distance the best-known male French actor in the world in 1968, having starred in a string of international hits, beginning with his turn as Tom Ripley in René Clément’s Plein Soleil in 1960, the first adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley.
A man of preternaturally good looks and icy composure, Delon was as in demand by arthouse auteurs (though, curiously, not by those associated with the nouvelle vague) as he was by producers of big budget international productions, many of which filmed separate English versions to maximise their market potential in the United States.
In the autumn of 1968, Delon was implicated in an improbably shady criminal case when the body of his associate Stevan Marković was found wrapped in plastic in a rubbish tip a few miles west of Versailles. Marković, a 31-year-old Yugoslav migrant, was often mistakenly referred to in the press as Delon’s bodyguard, probably because it was the most succinct description for a small-time tough who lived in Delon’s Paris town house and was often photographed in the company of the actor and his wife Nathalie.
In reality, Marković was half-friend, half-hanger-on, whom the Delons had agreed to put up after his release from a Belgian prison in 1965, at the request of a mutual friend, Miloš Miloševic, who would himself die violently the following year, in a suspected murder-suicide alongside his lover Carolyn Mitchell, the estranged wife of Mickey Rooney.
READ MORE
Frequenting such louche company was nothing unusual for Delon, as British author Edward Chisholm outlines in this compelling account of the Marković Affair. Delon’s relationships with the criminal underworld long predated his acting career, and he was himself a bit of a wheeler-dealer – according to a long-withheld military file unearthed by Chisholm in the police archives, nearly a third of Delon’s tour of duty in the Indochina war was spent in a military prison, and he was described by superiors as a “bad element in every respect”.
One of his more notable criminal links was the Corsican gangster François Marcantoni, who would, like Delon and his wife, be a suspect in the murder of Marković, who police believed was killed because he had attempted to blackmail rich and powerful people, including the Delons, using compromising photos he had taken at orgies he hosted.
An already sensational case exploded further when the former prime minister (and future successor as president to Charles de Gaulle) Georges Pompidou and his wife Claude became embroiled in accusations of involvement in the orgies (which were later found to be smear jobs by Pompidou’s political rivals).
Working from police archives years before Delon’s death in 2024, Chisholm does a fine job setting the scene for the murky backdrop of the Trentes Glorieuses, France’s postwar boom years, where crime and politics, forged by shared experiences in the Resistance, became intricately connected. There are also enjoyable forays into film analysis, where the author situates Delon’s career success in the context of his dubious relations, particularly in three key Delon films from the 1960s – Plein Soleil, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and Jacques Deray’s La Piscine.
Delon was not immediately harmed by his involvement in the case but his career did begin to stagnate in the following decade, and would ultimately tail off in the 1980s. As Chisholm correctly observes, Delon became increasingly typecast, as either a cop or a criminal, even in his better films such as Melville’s The Red Circle. For the last few decades of his life, Delon was mainly fodder for the gossip pages, as he quarrelled publicly with his children, who accused him of being a tyrannical father, and lost many admirers through his support for Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.
[ Alain Delon: French screen star dies aged 88Opens in new window ]
The book is not without its flaws. Some readers might find Chisholm’s breathless style off-putting and his imagined dialogue, reconstructed from archival and press accounts, is disappointingly humdrum for a crime story replete with larger-than-life characters. There are also a few factual errors: Charles de Gaulle was not a native of Brittany, but was born in Lille and raised in Paris; and universal paid holidays for French workers were introduced in 1936, not 1956, though they were extended to three weeks in the latter year.
And yet, there is no denying that Murder in Paris ’68 is an enthralling account of a scandal that, even six decades on, seems scarcely credible. Those already familiar with the Marković case will not learn much new, but many anglophone readers will be coming to the subject for the first time and the book will serve them well. Like Chisholm’s first book, the bestselling A Waiter in Paris, an enjoyable memoir of his time working as a tyro waiter in a Parisian bistro, this one is likely to find an enthusiastic readership.
Oliver Farry is an Irish journalist in Paris
