This is one of those rare books wherein the mystery found in its pages may well be less significant that the one attached to its origins. Author and critic Julian Symons famously observed that it was a 'dazzling… unrepeatable box of tricks', while poet and critic Sir Herbert Read succinctly if puzzlingly described it as 'Hegelian'. On publication, the book was credited to Cameron McCabe, a busy fellow since he also serves as the protagonist and narrator, dishing up a bizarre tale of a young actress whose body is discovered on the cutting room floor of a London film studio, and who is later joined by her ex-lover, a Norwegian actor, who is found with a nasty bullet hole in his head.

Film editor McCabe tells the story as if he is reading a pastiche of an American crime novel, but translated by a drunken Surrealist. Flicking out details like cigarette ash, he challenges the reader to keep up as he dashes frantically around the city on the trail of a killer, racing from the studio in King's Cross towards the West India Dock Road, then around Holborn, Fleet Street, everywhere, in fact. Viewed from his warped perspective, London has never seemed so alien. Just to keep things from becoming too cosy, he also engages in a complex and torrid love triangle and a battle of wits with Scotland Yard's Detective Inspector Smith, where roles are reversed, then apparently reversed again.

Decades later, the real author was revealed as Ernest Julius Borneman, a young refugee from Nazi Germany with an eccentric command of English, which may explain the novel's unusual narrative, and who later became a noted sexologist, which may explain the love triangle. Utterly unique, this is a truly haunting book that, once read, is not easily forgotten.

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