One of my favorite stories about Jack London involves another writer, John Steinbeck, who was inspired by London's ability to turn his adventures in the Yukon and as a hobo and sailor into best-selling fiction.

It helps explain why Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford to work on the San Francisco docks, only to discover manual labor left him too tired to write.

London didn't have that problem, at least until his morphine addiction got the better of him, long after his best work, including "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang."

Paul Malmont's heavily researched novel, "Jack London in Paradise," is set mostly in 1916, the last year of London's life. (He died mysteriously at 40.) It's set in Hawai'i, where London has fled after his grand house in Sonoma, Calif., "a cathedral to writing that was to stand a thousand years," burned down.

Malmont uses another real-life figure, actor and filmmaker Hobart Bosworth, who starred in and produced the first silent movies based on London's work. In financial trouble, Bosworth needs one more big script from London. "Birth of a Nation" big.

It's a story filled with promise, but Malmont seems unsure if he's writing a literary adventure or a more serious novel-as-biography. His dialogue is stilted, especially when London tries to face his painful past through a new idea called psychotherapy.