Shadows Of The Silver Screen by Christopher Edge, review Christopher Edge brings back Penelope Tredwell (a spiky thirteen-year-old orphan heiress) and her friends at The Penny Dreadful magazine for a follow-up to Twelve Minutes To Midnight. Shadows Of The Silver Screen is plotted in 1900, around a mysterious filmmaker approaching Tredwell's magazine with a proposal to turn one of Montgomery Flinch's stories into a silent film. Not for nothing is Flinch known as 'The Master Of The Macabre'. Edge's story has hansom cab-drivers, telegrams, half-moon spectacles and ghosts in a quirky historical novel for children that captures an eerie Victorian atmosphere. There is a "By Jove" and such thrown in, but most of the language is fresh and entertaining, with one character described thus: "His handsome suntanned features were framed by red-tinged whiskers, which gave his face a vulpine cast." The dark secrets of the film-maker and his Véritéscope camera are revealed in twists set around ghosts at the ancestral home of the Eversholt family. It all comes to a spooky conclusion at the world premiere of the film at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, with the Prince Of Wales watching. You'll have to read the book to discover why the theatre "rang to the sound of screams." Shadows Of The Silver Screen is a serious (and playful) intelligent historical thriller for children.