The Sheriff of Nottingham

Has there ever been a less lovable character in folk literature than that craven creature, the nameless Sheriff of Nottingham?

He remains to this day, fed byHollywood versions of the legend, the hateful, impotent foil to thatcelebrated bowman, Robin Hood. Now, with his novel, The Sheriff of Nottingham, Richard Kluger turns the timeless tale on its head in a vivid,compassionate narrative based upon authentic and quite startlinghistory.

Through a fusion of art and documentedfact, Kluger portrays a far different sheriff. Philip Mark, a soldierof fortune from Touraine in the heart of France and actually cited byname in the text of the Magna Carta as objectionable to the king'sbarons, is a complex figure, a man with a heart, a conscience, and deftpolitical instincts. Posted to Nottinghamshire in 1208 as the crown'schief law officer, he is answerable only to King John himself, a monarch who has been handed down to posterity - perhaps not altogether fairly - as an unredeemed tyrant presiding over a tumultuous age.

In vital, dramatic colors, Klugerpaints a panorama of that England at the dawn of modernity and itsprincipal players and events. Here are dark intrigue and adroitstatecraft, hand-to-hand combat and sharp wits in collision, anavaricious ruler attempting to seduce his sheriff's wife on Christmasnight, and the hatching of the Magna Carta itself at Nottingham Castleone fine September eve in 1213 (along with the reasons why Philip Markis specifically mentioned in that immortal document).

Storytelling at its most gripping comes in the novel's powerfully moving centerpiece. Thirty sons of Welshwarlords are consigned to Philip's castle as royal hostages on theorders of the king to ensure that their volatile fathers behavethemselves back in chronically rebellious Wales. The boys are treatedwith respect and kindness by the sheriff and his family until a yearlater when King John thunders into the castle courtyard at the head ofhis entourage and, in a fury over a new Welsh uprising, roars at Philip, "Hang the hostages - hang them all - and at once!" How Sheriff Markresponds to this grim command forms the moral core of the novel.

In The Sheriff of Nottingham, Kluger has woven an engrossing medieval tapestry that transports thereader beyond the mists of time and legend to witness the struggle of asingular character seeking to act honorably in a time ruled by savageimpulse and civil uproar.