Jack London in Paradise

The salad days of Hollywood intersect with Jack London's final days in this spirited but loquacious imagining of the author's volatile relationship with real-life actor and filmmaker Hobart Bosworth. It's 1916, and Bosworth, director of half a dozen highly successful films of London's works, is desperate for a hit to bail out his sinking studio. His only recourse is to travel to Hawaii and ask his estranged friend for an original script to film. London offers a somewhat unlikely adaptation of his prehistoric epic, Before Adam, for which Bosworth gives a dry run as a short-lived stage vehicle cast with the local natives. Malmont (The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril ) crafts an entertaining buddy story, but as the novel's focus shifts from Bosworth to London, the plot wanders distractingly all over the map and dissipates its dramatic impact in a surfeit of subplots. Some judicious edits could have made this novel as taut and lean as one of its subject's tales. (Jan.)