In 1958, Yugoslavian hustler Stefan Marković crosses the border into France, eager for all the opportunity this new world will offer. Almost exactly 10 years later, he is found on the outskirts of Paris, dead in suspicious circumstances. His closest known associate is none other than film-star Alain Delon, the broodingly handsome golden boy of French cinema, for whom Marković worked in tenuous, tense employment. From that single connection spirals out a web of implication drawing together small-time criminals, Parisian socialites, crime bosses and perhaps even those at the top of France’s political order. Stranger still are the connections the case draws to Delon’s films, from the envy-driven doublings of Purple Noon to the titular contract killer of Le Samouraï. Life seems to have imitated art, but the question is: how closely?

In Murder in Paris ’68, Edward Chisholm breathes life into a case that has been lost to archives and long-forgotten police files, combining facts with imagined exchanges and careful speculation. There is a fascinating story to be told about the death of Stefan Marković, and Chisholm rises to the task of telling it, darting between broad overviews of 1960s French culture – its politics, its media and, most of all, its crime – and incisive examinations of his leading figures, whose complex psychology and fraught relationships leap off the page. While the question of who killed Stefan Marković remains unsolved to this day, Chisholm offers decidedly more interesting questions to the reader: who were Stefan Marković and Alain Delon? What brought them together, and more importantly, what drove them apart? Although Murder in Paris ’68 can’t offer any definitive answers – despite Chisholm’s exhaustive research, some things are truly lost to history – it does deliver a gripping journey filled with punchy prose, film-set glamour and film‑noir sleaze.