The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor

A “Detective Story With a Difference” or Too Clever for Its Own Good?

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe is a crime fiction cult novel and a critic’s dream.

Synopsis

Cameron McCabe is an editor at a 1930s motion picture studio.  It was long before the digital era, so McCabe physically cuts celluloid and sticks it back together, making sense of yards and yards of film.  Bloom — his boss — enters the editing suite and tells him to edit Estella Lamare out of their latest film.  No easy feat in a movie about a girl meets boy meets girl love triangle, but McCabe dutifully starts the task of cutting the starlet out of the film.

The following morning Lamare is discovered on the cutting-room floor, lying in a pool of her own blood.

McCabe finds himself at the centre of a murder enquiry with more murders, confessions and suspects than you can shake a stick at.  As the story progresses, events are retold over and over again.  Each retelling adds another layer of detail so the reader can work out what is happening.  Each new perspective adds an extra coat of understanding as the tale morphs from detective story to courtroom drama to a literary review of crime fiction.

There is another twist; this is no ordinary detective story; not only is McCabe the centre of the plot, but he is also the narrator and author.  The book is an autobiography.

Review

The book was met with critical acclaim in the 1930s for its originality.  There was also the underlying question, who is Cameron MacCabe?  His real identity wasn’t discovered until thirty years after publication.

McCabe’s prose is very slick with some of my favourite one-liners:

The fat woman came and offered us Turkish cigarettes and little red cubes of sweet stuff that smelled like soap and tasted like hell.

Whilst very clever, this is not an easy book to read.  You must pay serious attention to the constantly developing plot and whip-crack prose.  The last fifth of the book, an epilogue that revisits the case — or as one critic described it, “elaborate metatextual apparatus” — was maybe just a little too clever for its own good.  Or perhaps just a little too clever for me.

Excerpt

He walked in without knocking and began to talk before the door had closed behind him.

‘You have to re-edit this junk’ he said.  Then he coughed and wiped the sweat off his neck.  Sweat always showed on his neck, never on his forehead.  He was too fat.  He loved French pastries and Viennese strudel.  It was an unhappy love.  You could see him growing fatter and he didn’t like it.

‘Yes sir,’ I said, ‘and what can I do for your personal comfort?’

He smiled — rather reluctantly — and after a little while he said, still breathing in an unpleasant way: ‘No kidding, Mac.  Cut it out.  Cut out the girl.’

The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor by Cameron McCabe