With his first book, A Waiter in Paris, English writer Edward Chisholm took us into a dark world that lay beyond the white tablecloths of the city’s brasseries. A ripe and rich memoir, written with a combination of relish and horror, it revealed his fascination for French food culture, laced with his revulsion at the layers of human sweat and sadness it covers up.
Now, in his second, dangerously glittering book, Chisholm extends his double-edged francophilia deep into every fibre of Parisian society. He takes as his starting point the discovery on October 1, 1968 of a body wrapped in plastic, found in a field on the rural outskirts of Paris.
It is a gruesome event recounted in cold detail – “the base of the skull is smashed, the jaw hangs loose, the nose is broken, the cheeks burst” – and one which eventually sparks a national scandal. Because the dead man is Stevan Marković, friend, bodyguard and chauffeur of France’s most handsome movie star, Alain Delon.
From here, Chisholm starts digging. And digging. Obsessively, until the book becomes as much about his own search for long-lost truth as it does about recreating the smoke-filled rooms of Paris at an iconic time in its history. A few months earlier, a spirit of student revolution had taken to the city’s streets and captured global attention, but here was a murder that could provoke even more upheaval.
Chisholm’s investigations – we can picture him surrounded by ledgers and cuttings – take him into another dark heart, that of French privilege and celebrity, of politics and espionage, into military and police secrets, where the criminal underworld scratches its way into the Paris night and social scene, brushing cold shoulders with eminent leaders and their wives.
The locations zip around like a Bond movie – St-Tropez, Megève and Chamonix in the Alps, nightspots such as Chez Régine, the Élysée Palace, court rooms, grubby cafes, and 36 Quai des Orfèvres, where the Police nationale carry out their investigations on anything including large-scale crimes, drug trafficking, prostitution, racketeering, kidnap, hostage taking, bomb attacks, organised crime and homicides. Remarkably, L’affaire Marković – as this case will come to be known – takes in many of the above.
Simmering at the centre of it all is Delon. Chisholm is blinded, haunted, dazzled by his star’s sexy froideur, his panther-like grace and his sheer ability to style things out.
Chisholm has a knack for transporting us back in time – we’re by the famous pool of La Piscine when police interrupt the shoot; we’re on the set of the sun-drenched Ripley adaptation, Plein Soleil, and at a meeting between the actor and director Luchino Visconti.
There’s a steely economy to his descriptions, a staccato delivery to the dialogue. “Delon falls hard. Visconti is everything: beautiful, erudite, domineering. An aesthete and a tyrant. A perfectionist who smokes 80 cigarettes a day and guzzles medication for the sore throat they give him.”
Using dialogue taken from transcripts of interviews, from diaries, official documents, Chisholm edits and chops, his point of view shifting from Delon, to the mysterious Marković and his shady associates, and even into the offices of de Gaulle and Pompidou. It’s all shadows, until the sunlight of the south of France dazzles us.
The glamour is palpable and yet you feel Chisholm is somehow in fear of it, his reluctance to get too high on his own act of reconstruction, as if he might tumble irretrievably back into the seductive waters of Delon’s orbit.
And then there’s the victim. Marković proves difficult to love. He’s a chancer and a petty thief with a big mouth, and yet Chisholm finds the heart in him, the quivering, cowardly confusion at the centre of this man – for Stevan, too, is driven crazy by Delon.
Sex, straight and gay, pulses throughout these pages like a threat, obsessions that might turn poisonous or treacherous, with rumours of photographs of famous folk caught in the uncompromising flare of the flashbulbs in illicit sex clubs, tales of orgies to make Caligula blush. Did Stevan take these images? Who organised them, and who do they reveal?
Politics, too, is to the fore, the portrait of a Paris society dealing, badly, with its post-colonial fallout. Chisholm details the blame and shame of Paris’s postwar politics, as the city itself prefers to hide the cracks with the sleek modernism of its industrial boom, the cars, the clubs, the jukeboxes, pinball machines and all-night drugstores on the Champs-Élysées. Delon feels like the focal point of it all, a lone, lethal, stylish, seductive Samurai.
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The fusty scent of the story leads us everywhere, like the all-pervasive stench of a dead body. New characters come – Corsican gangsters, investigating officers like Patard, lowlife snitches such as André Rioult, names that have been dormant footnotes in French history for so long, now given life by Chisholm’s restless eye and thirst for dramatic revivification.
The book is haunted by Delon’s beauty and the spell he holds over our author, a hypnotic and gripping love affair between spectator and subject, like the police detective obsessed with his prey. Chisholm is clearly in love with Paris and with cinema, and with movie stars, but it’s this particular movie star’s masculinity, fluid sexuality and ability to shapeshift and obfuscate that has got into our author’s soul.
A Waiter in Paris was good – so good that I’m now producing the film adaptation of it – but Murder in Paris ’68 is a jump forward in narrative technique for Chisholm. The prose is bolder, ballsier in reaching for its metaphors and imaginative leaps, more confident of its romanticism, more convinced of its own theatricality and magic.
It becomes clear, early on, that Chisholm isn’t going to solve this crime. Lord knows, he tries, leaving no stone unturned – or no stone pushed up a hill, if we may get all existential about it, and how can we not? It’s a search for truth, but one that gets so bewildering and foggy and impenetrable that the constant zoom-outs to our author as befuddled, bewitched investigator are what make the quest so compelling.
The will-he/won’t-he isn’t about Chisholm solving this crime, but about whether he’ll dive back in and try. The fact that he takes us along with him on this Sisyphian task is the masterstroke.
But Chisholm is always fascinated by process, by details, just as he was when waiting and laying tables. Here, his own search engulfs him with a sense of desperation.
You sense him stretching, reaching, straining, as if writing this book, this act of factuality laced with febrile imagination, can transport him, and us his readers, back into the head, the kimono, the trenchcoat, the sports car, the swimming pool, the bedroom of Delon. And as if that could lead us to finding out, finally, what happened to Stevan Marković, and why.
The book is a tremendous achievement, genre-defining, sexy, supple, scary; an investigative book that plays out like a terrific movie thriller. And I’m sure one day, it will do exactly that, on a big screen. If anyone can ever match the deadly, challenging, murderous starry stare of Alain Delon…
Murder in Paris ’68 by Edward Chisholm is published by Monoray.
Jason Solomons is a film critic, journalist, broadcaster and producer
