McCabe, Cameron - The Face on the Cutting Room Floor (1937)

Source: Wikipedia

The Face on the Cutting - Room Floor is a crime novel, arguably a whodunnit, by Ernest Bornemann writing as Cameron McCabe. It was first published in London in 1937. The book makes use of the false document technique: It pretends to be the true story of a 38 year - old Scotsman called Cameron McCabe who writes about a crucial period of his own life during which several people close to him are murdered.

Publishing and reception history

There have been four important editions of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor:

1. the first edition, published in 1937 by Victor Gollancz Ltd with their trademark bright yellow dust jacket;
2. a 1974 facsimile reprint by Gollancz of their 1937 edition;
3. a 1981 edition by Gregg Press (a division of G. K. Hall & Co.), Boston, Mass., containing an extensive Afterword which includes the tapescript of a long interview with Borneman conducted in 1979 by Reinhold Aman, the editor of the scholarly U.S. periodical Maledicta (Waukesha, Wisconsin); and, finally,
4. a 1986 Penguin edition (in the "Classic Crime" series), which also includes the Afterword of the 1981 edition (ISBN 0140080856).

Borneman began working on this—his first—novel shortly after arriving in England from Nazi Germany as an 18 year - old in 1933, with practically no command of the English language. He was a quick learner though, considered the detective story he was writing "no more than a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language", and had it finished when he was not yet 20 years of age.

When the book was eventually published in 1937 traditionalists and purists of crime fiction felt rather cheated while critics and reviewers such as Milward Kennedy, E. R. Punshon, Ross McLaren and Sir Herbert Read liked the novel for its ingenuity ("a detective story with a difference"). Eric Partridge considered it a mine of information on contemporary English slang and quoted extensively from it in his lexica. The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor saw eight reprints in various pocket editions and also appeared in French and German translations but was never brought out in the United States.

Forgotten for decades, Borneman's first novel was rediscovered in the 1960s by Ordean A. Hagen, who praised it as one of the milestones of crime fiction in his Who Done It?. In the early 1970s Julian Symons, in his history of crime fiction entitled Bloody Murder, famously referred to The Face as "the detective story to end detective stories".

However, the identity of the author was a mystery itself. Neither Symons nor the Gollancz publishing house knew anything about a Cameron McCabe, not even whether he was still alive or not. Accordingly, when Gollancz brought out their 1974 facsimile edition, only a few months after Symons had mentioned the novel, they advertised for McCabe's heirs and placed the royalties in a trust fund.

Two months later, still in 1974, Julian Symons reviewed the Gollancz reprint, revealing, after some research, the real name of the author as a certain Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann, a man about whom he said he knew nothing except his name ("More information from readers would be welcome"). Another reviewer, British novelist and screenwriter Frederic Raphael, also admitted having no idea who the author was. Only then was it found out that Bornemann was the Borneman, the famous sexologist who was alive and well, living in the small Austrian village of Scharten, and teaching at several universities both in Austria and his native Germany.

The title

The proverbial "face on the cutting - room floor" is a character in a movie who, after the shooting is completed, is completely removed from the film, for whatever reason. The same idea also holds true for documentaries, where in the editing process the large amount of raw footage is cut down to a manageable size and where it can happen that a particular part of the film is completely removed from the final version.

Outline of the plot

The novel, written in the first person in the form of Cameron McCabe's confession, is set in London in the mid - 1930s. McCabe works in the film industry and has made himself a name as a supervising film editor working mainly on feature films. One day his boss, Isador Bloom, orders him to cut out altogether a young aspiring actress, Estella Lamare, from a movie which has just been produced. As the picture is about a love triangle McCabe does not see the point in doing as he was told and immediately suspects some foul business. He does not know then that this is in fact Bloom's revenge on Lamare for "showing him a cold shoulder" when he made a pass at her.

One Friday morning soon afterwards, Lamare's body is found on the floor of John Robertson's workplace at the studio, which happens to be a state - of - the - art cutting room. The place is equipped with an automatic camera which, once it has been set, starts recording the moment the door to the room is opened. Estella Lamare has died from stab wounds, and although the roll of film showing her slow death can be found it cannot be decided exactly how she died. On the film Ian Jensen, her partner in her last movie (from which she was to be cut out), can be seen struggling with Lamare, but the cause of her death may have been either an accident or suicide, or murder.

As Jensen is nowhere to be found Scotland Yard assumes that he is Lamare's murderer and that he has escaped to his native Norway. However, four days later, on December 3, 1935, his body is found in a shabby rented room in a cheap boarding house in London. Jensen has been poisoned and, at a point in time when he was already dead, shot in the head.

The police investigations are conducted by Detective Inspector Smith of Scotland Yard. Right from the start there is antagonism between Smith and McCabe: Each suspects the other of knowing more about the case than he admits, with McCabe repeatedly assuming the role of detective while Smith seemingly has no idea how to solve the crime. Eventually the confrontation between the two antagonists escalates — their "game" turns into a "fight"—when Smith has McCabe arrested for the murder of Ian Jensen. McCabe refuses to be represented by a lawyer during his trial ("a layman conducting his own defence"), and systematically tries to break down the case against his person and to win over the jury to his cause.

In the course of the trial a number of facts about the people involved in the two deaths are revealed. For example, we learn that McCabe himself is a "morally uprooted" man who has replaced "eternal values" with "values of the moment". Until his arrest he has a relationship with Maria Ray, the actress who, together with Lamare and Jensen, forms the love triangle in the recently completed film. Although Maria Ray is the love of his life, McCabe cannot help starting an affair with Dinah Lee, his secretary, and, by carrying on two relationships at the same time, double - crossing both women. In his defence he even goes so far as to use Ray's own promiscuity — she has had affairs with both McCabe and Jensen — to question her credibility as a witness for the prosecution. He also insinuates that Smith has used doctored evidence to build up his case against him.

The members of the jury are impressed, pronounce a verdict of "Not guilty", and McCabe is acquitted. Smith now turns out to be a policeman who cannot lose but who actually loses his job as a result of McCabe's acquittal. When McCabe eventually tells him that he is Jensen's murderer after all it is because he realizes that he has irrevocably lost Maria (as well as Dinah), who would not even speak to him on the phone, and that there is not anything left in this world that might keep him alive. Now that he has written his story down for posterity he no longer minds being the target of Smith's revenge, who thinks McCabe's belated confession is the last straw. McCabe posts his manuscript to an old journalist called A.B.C. Müller whose acquaintance he has recently made and immediately afterwards is found shot. Smith is arrested, tried, and hanged.

With Cameron McCabe dead, the addressee of his manuscript continues the narrative, a part of the book which is entitled "An Epilogue by A.B.C. Müller as Epitaph for Cameron McCabe". Müller sees to the proof reading and the publication of The Face on the Cutting - Room Floor and becomes an avid collector of reviews of the book, comparing it with the fiction of Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and even James Joyce. At the same time he deplores, and condemns, the "arrested development of the criminal mind", in particular of course McCabe's.

One day in London Müller bumps into Maria Ray, whom he has not seen again since the trial, and they have a talk. To Müller's surprise, she claims that McCabe committed suicide—as an act of revenge, in order to get Smith convicted for murder. She also tells Müller that Smith was in love with her. At the end of the novel, Müller on the spur of the moment wants to propose to Maria Ray but then decides instead to "shoot her dead".

Thus, in Borneman's novel, Estella Lamare is "the face on the cutting - room floor", both literally and metaphorically.

I’ve been intrigued by the title for some years, so when the chance to buy The Face On The Cutting-Room Floor (1937) by ‘Cameron McCabe’ came along, I seized it. Alas, what Saint Julian Symons called ‘The detective story to end all detective stories’ is a sad shambles. The title is far and away the best thing about it.

A precis: the protagonist and narrator, also called Cameron McCabe, is a film editor for a British film company. He is instructed to re - edit a movie in such a way as to remove all appearances of the co - star, Estella Lamar. Soon afterwards Estella is found dead at the studio. Luckily the room in which she died has an infra - red camera, set to start filming when someone enters the room; unluckily, the film has disappeared. When it reappears it seems to indicate that Estella was killed by her co-star Jensen; but Jensen himself turns up dead. His stomach is full of barbiturates; but he has been shot through the head.

A Scotland Yard detective, Smith, appears, bumbles through the case and ends up arresting McCabe. McCabe goes to trial, defends himself, makes some highly implausible speeches and gets off. Smith is sacked, but appears on McCabe’s doorstep the day after McCabe is released. He knows McCabe did it; McCabe confesses in return for a little time to finish his account of the case -- i.e. the book - before Smith shoots him. Smith shoots him, gives himself up and is hanged.

McCabe’s manuscript then makes its way to a journalist called Müller, who writes a long postscript about the book, detective stories, (real) detective story critics, McCabe and the other characters, in which a different ending is proposed. This is tacked on at the tail of the book.

Finally, in this edition (Penguin Classic Crime, 1986) there is a real interview at the end with the real author, Ernst Borneman, a scriptwriter and professor of sexology living in Austria, whose identity was rediscovered in the 1970s. The book ends (finally!) with a letter from Borneman to Otto Penzler written in 1981. Borneman himself describes The Face... as ‘mannered and puerile’, and that seems to me to sum the whole thing up remarkably well.

What’s wrong with the book? The writing - by a new German immigrant to England - is a bizarre welter of American slang, Cockney idioms and sentences that never were before on sea or land. Here's a sample:

‘This thing has a funny smell but if you remember it and put it down and let others read it and if they see it again and feel it again hear it tick and smell its funny insistent smell again and maybe like it and maybe don’t but smell it as it is and always was and always will be after all the changes have come and gone - if you try to do it and get it done and feel that it was worth doing then you’ve done what you could do and it’s no use trying to find out whether it was really worth it and whether it did what it set out to do: whether it did change what it set out to change.’

Yes, this is cut - rate James Joyce, mingled with Ernest Hemingway on amphetamines:

“Well, probably he saw the film before you found it.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“It doesn’t check up.”

“Check up with what?”

“With what actually happened.”

“All right. Now what’s next?”

“Robertson.”

“Why? What’s wrong with him? Did he kill her?”

“No, Jensen did. But it happened in Robertson’s room.”

And the book abounds with impenetrable, implausible idioms apparently made up on the spur of the moment. What, for instance, is the G - man - wife - and - children business?

Every event in the case is gone over at least three times: in the narration, in McCabe’s discussions with Smith, in the court case, in Smith’s denouement and in Müller’s recount. Take away the repetition and the book would be eighty pages shorter. Seldom has so much fuss been made about something so badly written.

Obviously it fails as a book. Does it also fail as a detective story? I feel it does, but to say why is not easy. There are clues, of a sort; a detective, of a sort; a murderer, of a sort. What it lacks is plausibility. Take away the weird language and over - writing, and what’s left is a highly unlikely story in which people do inexplicable things.

Borneman himself realises this; on several occasions in the book he asserts that odd things do happen in real life. But this isn’t real life, it’s a would - be detective story; and without plausibility the whole structure collapses. Rational deduction has no place in an environment where anyone can do anything for no reason. Score: Symons zero - Bornemann ten. Mannered and puerile it is.

Jon.