John Griffith London, born John Griffith Chaney, was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. His most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush. Hearts of Three is an adventure novel that was finished right before the writer's death and released in 1919–1920 in the New York Journal. As Jack London recounts in the interesting prefix to this unusual book, not only was he incapable of writing a successful film script but “because a man had written a score of novels was no guarantee that he could write a good scenario. Quite to the contrary, it was quickly discovered that the surest guarantee of failure was a previous record of success in novel-writing.” And on the other hand, successful scriptwriters such as Charles Goddard, the co-author of this action novel with comic-book overtones, “couldn’t write novels to save themselves”. Here we have Francis Morgan, a young idler of about 25 who has inherited a lot of money from his very dynamic father, a descendant of the famous 17th-Century pirate Henry Morgan, who decides to go off on a hunt for the hidden treasure of his illustrious forbear after running into a Latin-American adventurer who has a map showing where Henry Morgan had hidden his quite fabulous treasure. In 1992, the novel was cinematized and released under the same title as TV mini-series in Russia and Ukraine. Enjoy free online English audiobook “Hearts of Three”, story by Jack London.
