I Was the Cat, drawn by Benjamin Dewey. Jake Arnott featured him as one of the main characters in his 2017 novel The Fatal Tree. Jonathan Wild has an important role in the background to the fantasy novel The Hanging Tree, the sixth part of Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. Much of the book's plot revolves around a secret magical treatise by Isaac Newton, which was stolen by Jonathan Wild and disappeared for centuries, only to reappear in the underworld of 21st-century London. Confessions of the Fox, a novel by Jordy Rosenberg (2018), mostly about Jack Sheppard, has Wild as an important character. In popular culture In 1969, James Clavell's screenplay for the film Where's Jack? told the story of Jack Shepherd (Tommy Steele) with Wild (Stanley Baker) being depicted as a suave and sinister criminal mastermind. Songwriter Jimmy Webb describes Wild's life and subsequent hanging in the 1977 song "Highwayman". A 1985 recording by the country music supergroup The Highwaymen entered the Hot Country Songs Billboard chart on 18 May 1985, rising to number 1, and spending 20 weeks total on the chart. Webb had a dream that he was a highwayman, which initially inspired the writing of the song. The first verse describes the life of a character who, like Wild, was executed in "the spring of twenty-five": In the 1999 film Plunkett & Macleane, Wild was the inspiration for the film's antagonist; the psychopathic Thief Taker General Chance, played by Ken Stott. See also Liberty of the Mint for more background on "anomalous districts" of lawlessness. Notes Bibliography There are a few treatments of Wild that attempt to dramatise his life, but there remains only one full length non-fiction biography on Wild: Howson, Gerald. Thief-Taker General: Jonathan Wild and the Emergence of Crime and Corruption as a Way of Life in Eighteenth-Century England. New Brunswick, NJ and Oxford, UK: 1970. Other 20th century sources Brief discussions of Jonathan Wild may be found in editions of the Beggar's Opera, the Works of John Gay, the Works of Henry Fielding, editions of Fielding's Jonathan Wild, the Works of Daniel Defoe, and biographies of Defoe, such as the one by Paula Backschieder. All of these are prefatory and explanatory material. Most of these derive either from the Dictionary of National Biography or from Gerald Howson. Lyons, Frederick J. Jonathan Wild, Prince of Robbers. 1936. Moore, Lucy. The Thieves' Opera.