The scandal that rocked Frannce for more than a decade. The first line sets everything up: “The body is found by accident at first light.”

When Harold Evans was editor of the Sunday Times, there would often be a long, very readable expository investigations like this. A bit Truman Capote. Chisolm spins a fine yarn. He has a fine scandal to deal with. The Markowitz affair.

The key players have passed on, so now it can be told, pieced together from police notes from the 1960s. Investigations then were rather different. Lots of handwritten notes. Uncaptioned photographs. Lots of boxes unmarked in archives. The underworld was different too.

There is the murder on page one. It sends ripples through the security services and out to the edges of both the political world and the glamour of the French cinema. Names still reverberate. Alain. Natahlie. Georges Pompidou. Charles de Gaulle. Places too Marseille, Paris, St Tropez. Moments too like the jazz festivals at Antibes.  These were the days of bank robbers. le grande banditisme. Tony the Eel. Gaston Le Vieux. Not so long ago but a portrait of a nation on the cusp, the seedy byways, the secret trysts that bind.

We move from stuffy files, incriminating letters, swimming pools, night clubs to the night that Alain meets Nathalie which could be a film, might have been, still might be. Exciting reading. No one is telling the truth here, not so much a who as a why dunnit. Fascinating. I have my own theory. You will have yours. All of France has its own ideas for sure.