A famous literary hoax novel was implicated in a real Paris murder case.

Evidence

A book called I Spit on Your Graves, ostensibly by ‘Vernon Sullivan’ and translated by Boris Vian, was by Vian himself. Written on a kind of dare, it was a violent, sensationalist story about a black man who kills two white women to avenge the lynching of his brother, but is hunted down and eventually shot dead by the police. Vian made money from it, but got into trouble the following year when a man in Montparnasse strangled his girlfriend and shot himself, leaving a copy of the novel by his bed with the description of a strangling circled in ink in case anyone failed to notice the similarity. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 538

Categorization

• SHARE: A narrow, dark tidbit for someone interested in literary hoaxes or true-crime-adjacent literature; the circled strangling passage detail is the kind only a specific enthusiast would savor.
• STORYSTEM: The circled-in-ink detail is a ready-made noir plot device — a murderer deliberately framing a novelist by leaving the incriminating marked page beside the body.