The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor is a 1937 crime novel by Ernest Borneman writing as Cameron McCabe. It was first published in London. 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. Plot introduction Borneman began working on this novel — his first — shortly after arriving in England from Nazi Germany in 1933, with practically no command of the English language. However, he was a quick learner, considered the detective story he was writing "no more than a finger exercise on the keyboard of a new language", and had finished it when he was not yet 20 years old. Explanation of the novel's 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. Plot summary 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