This is one of these cases that remain in the collective memory, nevertheless blurred by the past decades. On October 1, 1968, a scrap dealer found in a discharge of the Yvelines the corpse of a man, wrapped in a mattress cover, with a bullet in the nape and the skull smashed. The investigation reveals that it is Stefan Markovic, the former secretary, bodyguard and light lining of Alain Delon, at the height of his glory. Some images collide: the star surrounded by a pack of journalists in the court of Versailles in 1969, or his roles of trigger in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville who blur the picture a little more.
It is from this affair that Philippe Brunel takes in in a novel in which the falsely peaceful atmosphere of the late 1960s, his triumphant hexagonal cinema and his settling of the “medium” were treading. A deaf nostalgia permeates the book whose writing combines efficiency and elegance: «No need to lie, life does not have the thickness that is attributed to it. It is nothing other than a long conversation with oneself, that you rehash infinitely under the assault of regrets, misunderstandings, sorrows which persist without managing to drive out the dark particles which cover it and dust it.»
Take over
Journalist, the narrator returns to Hyères, the city of Var, where in 1983 had led him to Pierre Salberg, a deemed investigator, determined to finally lift the veil on the Markovic affair. Recruited as a small assistant on a book-investigation project, the young man of the time, still uncertain of his vocation, had been formed by this great figure of the profession. Forty years later, he returned to the unfinished work of his former boss: “I was going to get back into his steps, register in his momentum, his melodic line and, with this first draft, give shape to his initial project and finish what he had started. »»
Philippe Brunel navigates with talent between fiction and reality, the learning novel of a young journalist, the affair and his meanders. He shows and recounts the close ties between showbiz stars and organized crime in Paris and on the Côte d’Azur. Then appear mafia like François Marcantoni, one of the main suspects of the assassination of Markovic, who wanted to register Alain Delon … in his “Circle of obligated”.
The Circle of Obligés, Philippe Brunel, Grasset, 240 p., 20,90 €
(Tagstotranslate) Book