About A Son: A Murder and A Father’s Search for Truth

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Gray was eventually given a life sentence with a minimum 23-year term for Morgan’s murder; the other two had six- and eight-year sentences for manslaughter and were released in nearly half that time. The Hehir family’s battle to prove that the police and probation services had been disastrously negligent in allowing Gray to be at liberty to kill for a second time meanwhile – a dispiriting, predictable process in which “every department of the institutions designed to protect you will lay claim to changing or having changed, to learning or promising to learn, to having been wrong but not being wrong again” – lasted longer than the latter two jail terms. Whitehouse’s idea was to try and tell Morgan’s story by putting the reader in his father’s shoes. “It sounds a bit lofty but I also wanted to somehow translate the pain and loss from his personal experience into a universal one; to tell Colin’s story, but also the story of his family and the town, which I think is so important in understanding what happened to Morgan.” Whitehouse rewrote the first entry in the diary, and sent it to Colin, who gave him permission to continue. Over the following months, the two texted and spoke regularly on the phone, and from these conversations Whitehouse was able to add further colour to the story. A story in three parts This, Whitehouse makes clear, was no extraordinary event. It happened to them; it could happen to you.

And we have our monthly recommendation from inside the book industry with Jacques Testard from Fitzcaraldo Editions,, who chooses Fleur Jaeggy’s The Water Statues translated by Gini Alhadeff from New Directions Publishing. Book lovers will be charmed by Mobile Library. . . It's a funny coming-of-age tale ( Good Housekeeping) MOBILE LIBRARY was published by Picador in the UK in January 2015. It won the Jerwood Fiction Prize that same year. Divided into three parts—"Loss", "Justice" and "Truth"— About a Son is exceptional, and not just because its beating heart derives from the vivid testament of a man who had “never written anything longer than a shopping list”. It is also outstanding for the way in which Whitehouse, as a professional writer, has used his craft—including an instinctive and brilliant use of the second-person voice—to write something seamless, where it is impossible to tell where Colin’s voice ends and Whitehouse’s begins. A more conventional approach might have been to ghost or co-write the book as a first-person memoir by Colin. I ask Whitehouse if this was ever on the cards. “There is a version of this book that is exactly that. But we always wanted to make it something other than a straightforward, conventional telling of the story. I never met Morgan but I wanted About a Son to reflect him in the way that another kind of book wouldn’t.” And all the while he and Sue are drip-fed information about his son’s killers: two brothers, Declan and Karlton Gray and an older acquaintance, Simon Rowbotham, who was once featured in a Channel 5 documentary, Benefit Life: Jailbird Boys Going Straight. They are derailed in this process by the discovery that Declan Gray, 21, who subsequently admitted the stabbing, had six years earlier beaten and killed another man, Adrian Howard, 38, after Howard refused to give him a cigarette. And then that Gray, having been released on licence from a young offender’s centre after four and a half years for that crime, had subsequently been arrested three times over allegations of serious violence but somehow never returned to jail for violating the conditions of his licence.Engagingly offbeat . . . the van becomes as much of a vehicle of fantasy as the Little Prince's biplane or James's giant peach - both a sanctuary from the outside world and a store of limitless possibilities . . . quietly profound . . . genuinely compelling ( Guardian) Mobile Libraryis an excellent novel about the power of words and how stories can help us transcend loss, loneliness and being an outsider. Whitehouse's ability to mix laughs with pathos makes for a warm-hearted book about family and a love letter to the importance of libraries (Nikesh Shukla, author of COCONUT UNLIMITED) Inspired by this diary, About A Son is a groundbreaking work of creative non-fiction that asks vital questions about the nature of justice and pays tribute to the unbreakable bond between a father and son. Colin, his wife, Sue, and their two other sons were called to the University hospital in Coventry where their new, terrible life of seeking justice for their murdered son began. Waiting rooms became a big part of it. And tea and unanswered questions and almost incomprehensible bureaucracy. In the first of these rooms, they were told by a police officer that they were not allowed to go to see their son, who had just died in the adjacent trauma theatre, because “he is a crime scene now”. If they tried to insist, the officer told them: “I will have to arrest you.”

I ask Whitehouse what his hopes are for the book once it is published. “The sole objective is for people to know Morgan’s story. The whole book turns on the moment where Colin and his family leave the trial, not feeling that justice has been properly served. And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing. Every day, these things happen to ordinary, normal people but their stories are rarely told.” Morgan’s story, now optioned for television by Tannadice Pictures, is both emblematic of the tragedy of rising knife crime and an indictment of underfunded police forces and underresourced institutions operating in times of austerity. “That’s what these things looks like. They look like Morgan,” says Whitehouse. Whitehouse’s writing is brilliant and devastating, having taken Colin’s diaries in their most raw, vulnerable form and turned them into a compassionate portrayal of a family’s grief and trauma, and a furious indictment of the institutions that failed Morgan and so many other young people like him. A difficult but necessary read. I was utterly floored by the emotional depth of About A Son– a book that reaches so deeply into the human experience that to read it is to be forever changed. It is an unflinching examination of grief, a painstaking deconstruction of injustice and a dispatch from the frontiers of the human heart’ Elizabeth Day

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It may provide the Hehirs with some comfort. I hope that this exceptional book will, too – because as much as it is about his death, it is also a tribute to who Morgan Hehir was, and the memory of his life will live long inside anyone who reads it. The diary eventually made it into the hands of David Whitehouse, an author originally from Nuneaton, and what emerged from this unique collaboration is a feat of creative non-fiction. A mix of true crime and memoir, it’s a book that pays tribute to Morgan as a young man whose life was suddenly cut short, while also being a book about Nuneaton itself, capturing the grit and tragedy beneath the surface of the town, as well as a sense of community and openness. You might baulk at reading such a dark story. But despite its grim subject matter, there are moments of sunny levity. A week after Morgan’s murder, the family decide to light and launch some Chinese lanterns from their garden in his memory. But the lanterns crash to the ground and set fire to the grass, and suddenly everyone starts laughing because they know Morgan would have found it funny too. The quirkiest plot we've seen for a while . . . making for a magical literary tour that evokes how the books we read as children inspire us. Heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure ( Glamour) I told the taxi driver the story of what happened the last time we went to the airport. They both laughed, reminding me that I could talk when I was in the mood. My obstacles were often my own.”