Celluloid Peach

Melia Nord is the ultimate shooting star with a beauty and confidence that takes her into the glamorous world of moving pictures. Soon Melia becomes a legend of the early silver screen watched by stuntman turned director Lance Murdoch. The couple marry although their luck is short lived as the on-set prank that brought them together takes its toll. Melia is hiding a ruinous secret – a vice that will destroy both her and the relationship.

5/5
Reviewed By Agnes Meadows (Poet)
“A fast-paced story with enough drama to make a film precursor of LA Confidential.”

CATCH A FALLEN STAR

This story of the life of mythical silent movie star Melia Nord starts slowly, but very quickly picks up pace, and becomes totally captivating. Beginning in the first decades of the 20th century, before the film industry moved to Hollywood, Celluloid Peach tells the life of Melia in the voice of her husband Lance Murdoch. It is an extremely well-researched novel – you really feel as if you’re seeing the development of film as a form of mass entertainment, and how the teams of people in the industry worked together to create ‘movie magic’.

Pearson’s writing is rich and beautifully constructed throughout, using the right kind of slang where necessary, and emphasising the speech patterns of all the main characters in a consistent and coherent way.  The novel is full of wonderful descriptions, metaphors and similes that roll easily from his pen without becoming pretentious or indigestible.

The main character Melia Nord comes across as a frightful brat – more than once I wanted to slap her, and felt for her long-suffering husband; although being exquisitely beautiful clearly had many advantages for her – it only goes to prove that if a woman is beautiful she can get away with murder (literally in the case of Melia).

Celluloid Peach builds up slowly, with quiet tension and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) clues as to what might take place later in the story.  The introduction of the murders adds extra layers of conflict, concluding the story neatly.  There are also poignant and shocking scenes of racial prejudice surrounding the bookish and kind black character Horace, a restrained reminder of what it must have been like for black people in the US at the turn of the last century and for years thereafter.

Altogether, Celluloid Peach is a great piece of writing in an intelligent and ultimately fascinating exploration of the birth of the movie industry and the lives of some of the people both in front of the camera and behind it.

I started off not being very interested in the plot or story-line, but quickly became genuinely interested in what was happening to the central characters.  I’m glad I made the effort to read it all the way through, as I felt the novel was altogether a masterclass of great writing.

Reviewed by Agnes Meadows, Poet

Click on the covers to read other books by writer Derek E. Pearson. You can also hear the author reading an extract from the novel Slave Skin, or watch him on video in conversation with Read2Write’s Juliette Foster.

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