An excerpt from In Leicester Fields by Ross Gilfillan

My guest today is Ross Gilfillan, author of In Leicester Fields, which was published on 26th September 2025. It’s available to purchase now in paperbook or as an ebook.

Set in 18th century London, In Leicester Fields is described as ‘a darkly compelling tale of guilt, corruption, and the terrible price of art’ and promises to immerse the reader in ‘a boisterous London of Hogarthian crowds, buzzing coffee houses, Grub Street newspapers and public executions’. I don’t know about you, but as a fan of historical fiction, I have to say that sounds rather enticing.

Below is an excerpt from In Leicester Fields to further whet your appetite.

About the Book

London, 1783. Dying artist Henry Grace seeks redemption for unspeakable crimes committed with a secret society, but his act of atonement threatens the city’s most powerful men.

When fiery female apprentice Michel Angelo and Grub Street journalist Morris “Mouse” Malone investigate Grace’s final masterpiece, they are drawn into a world of scandal, opium and murder that stretches from the stark wards of the Foundling Hospital to the artists’ salons of Paris and Venice.

Find In Leicester Fields on Goodreads

Excerpt from In Leicester Fields by Ross Gilfillan

Golden Square, Mayfair.  From where he perches atop his hemp-bound tower of creaking, wooden scaffolding, he is lord of London. 

He lays down his trowel upon the newest-laid course of small, yellow bricks, pops a broken, clay pipe unlit between thick, brown lips, and surveys the city, “Made glorious,” he loudly declaims across the tranquil square, “By this pink God’s summer sunshine!” 

Golden Square is wonderfully quiet, he thinks, a continent apart from the crowded court where he sleeps, when God wills it, with his wife and four children. 

Fifty feet below, the sounds from the street, the chivying of shovel on stone as mortar is mixed, and the complaining of iron-bound cart wheels on new-laid road, are muted by altitude and his own happy distraction. 

He arcs his south-easterly gaze from somewhere in the direction of the gardens of Burlington House, over a wilderness of brick and smoking chimney pots towards Covent Garden, that magical place where last night he surrendered himself and a full week’s wage to the fragile embrace and juniper breath of a virgin child no more than eleven years old, they had assured him. 

It’s not been a day since that happened, but already he feels better, so much improved. It is, as he said to Pissing Billy that very morning, like two full hods of Essex bricks had been lifted clean from his shoulders. 

 Now someone is calling from the street below. It’s not Billy – he’s off to find a place to piss again – but the pretty girl with the unmarked face who sells milk from the beast she drives before her with a switch. 

“Milk, milko, warm from the cow, milk a half-penny a pint,” she’s calling. She looks country-fresh and young, someone a man might spend a night with and not pay the awful price. 

And now there’s the rattle of a bunch of keys and the scrape of a heavy door opening. A kitchen maid in a bright white bonnet, clutching a jug and hitching her skirts, pops up from down in the area of the house next door. 

The milkmaid unstraps her stool and gets to work, talking to her customer all the time, balls of shrill laughter bouncing across the empty square and one or two unfettered words rising to the rooftops.

Now, as if called on stage for his amusement, come the chairmen again, turning into Golden Square, as they have at this time for five Thursdays past, the big, ox-faced one at the front huffing and cursing and a damn to the fines and behind, the other one whose face is hidden by an oversized hat from which sprouts the cue of a grey wig.

The big one offers a loud profanity as he sees not only the cow and two heedless women but three men who are unloading stacks of slates from a carrier’s cart. Like two flatirons with a box between them, the men in the dark hats snake and dog-leg around and between the obstacles in their way, the chair swinging wildly, the chairman cursing and whoever is inside holding on, no doubt, for sweet life. 

The builder chuckles and his broad, white smile follows them as they progress quickly down the road until they turn, a little too sharply, onto Brewers Street and are lost to sight. 

About the Author

Ross Gilfillan is an established literary novelist and former Daily Mail book reviewer (1998–2009). The Snake-Oil Dickens Man was 4th Estate’s lead fiction title at the Frankfurt Book Fair and sold at auction. His second novel, The Edge of the Crowd, was runner-up for the Encore Award for Best Second Novel. After completing a non-fiction title, Crime and Punishment in Victorian London, and debuting in crime fiction with The Capo’s Daughter (Rampart Books, 2025) under his pseudonym J.R. Fillan, Gilfillan now returns to his roots in literary historical fiction with the devastating In Leicester Fields.

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