Cameron McCabe's Books

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The list of Cameron McCabe’s books is short and sweet. He only wrote one crime novel.

The Face on the cutting-room floor by Cameron McCabe

The Face on the Cutting Room Floor: A crime fiction cult classic and a critic’s dream. Is it a “detective story with a difference” or too clever for Its own good? (Review)

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Biography

Cameron McCabe’s only crime novel was first published by Victor Gollancz in 1937 and again in 1974. Greg Press picked up the mantle in 1981, Penguin in 1986, Blackmask in 2005, and Picador in 2016. It has also been published in French and German.

His publishing record is not shoddy; I’d be delighted if somebody published a book I had written just once.

Rave reviews in Bloody Murder (a history of crime fiction) prompted the republishing in 1974. Nobody at the publisher could remember who Cameron McCabe was. Gollancz held the royalties from the book in trust until he came forward.

Who Was Cameron McCabe?

It turned out that Cameron McCabe was the pen name of Ernst Wilhelm Julius Bornemann (who anglicised his name to Ernest Borneman).

Borneman was the only son of a Jewish couple, born in Berlin in 1915. As he grew up, he became interested in Jazz and Communism. This combination didn’t endear him to the Nazi party, and he escaped to Britain in 1933 by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth on an exchange trip.

He wrote The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor on his arrival in the UK in his late teens. McCabe took much of the dialogue verbatim from the film studio where he worked. English was his second, newly acquired language.

More than a Writer

Borneman was a true polymath. He became a film editor, jazz musician and critic, psychoanalyst, and sexologist. Borneman was the first-ever recipient of the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for sexual science for his studies of early childhood sexuality. Ultimately he finished his career as a Professor at the University of Salzburg in Austria.

All of that is evidence that Borneman was a very clever man. What he wasn’t, though, was a particularly successful crime writer. He wrote two other crime novels, The Compromisers and Tomorrow is Now. Both have been lost to posterity, I couldn’t find a single online review of either, and you have to trawl through the second-hand bookshelves to find a copy.

A Flash in the Pan

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was a one-hit-wonder that received hugely positive reviews from the critics:

“Extraordinary work of postmodern fakery from the golden age of detective fiction” – Jonathan Coe

“A detective story with a difference” – The Edinburgh Evening News

“The detective story to end detective stories” – Julian Symons

“Emphatically not to be missed” – Reynolds News

“It presents a problem in deduction; it moves on a shifting plane; it has finite construction, a sometimes elliptical but always robust idiom and a solution that leaves one provoked” – The Cape Times

However, not everybody liked it. When asked, Borneman himself described it as “puerile”.

“I am delighted, though baffled, at the continued interest in my first-born book. I was nineteen when I wrote it, had just arrived in England as a penniless political refugee, could barely speak English. And had started writing because it was the only activity not forbidden by the British authorities…

… The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor was meant to be no more than a finger exercise on the keyboard of my new language. It had no message and wasn’t meant as a spoof on the great masters of the crime story. I simply wanted to know if my English was good enough to let me earn money with my pen.” (The Times)

Were the Critics Right?

All of this leaves me remembering the unease I felt writing diagnostic assessments in my O-level English Literature. Do critics know what they are talking about?

The only way to find out is to read it and decide for yourself.