The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor
Ernest Borneman
 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 Mc Cabe 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&mdash;their "game" turns into a "fight"&mdash;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&mdash;she has had affairs with both McCabe and Jensen&mdash;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&mdash;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.