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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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").

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").

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.