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

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A modern day fairytale . . . a plot that bounds along, dramatic event after dramatic event . . . It's also fun . . . The message becomes clear: stories can save us, unite us, show us other ways of being, offer solace . . . as messages go, it's a sound one, an example of the open-hearted warmth at the core of this book ( Financial Times) Powerful, eccentric . . . Whitehouse's writing is energetic and pacey, spiked with startling moments of tenderness and superbly controlled. Don't wait for the inevitable film ( The Times) Full of heart and hope and absurd bravery, as three lost souls and Bert the dog run away from home in a stolen mobile library. They then set about creating their own kind of family and rewriting the stories of their lives . . . the writer's charismatic, sparky tale of salvation and the stories within stories brilliantly shows how adventure can overtake and transform the most unlikely of people ( Sunday Express)

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 Goodreads Librari...: Please delete this book! (pt. 58) [Anyone requests; leave deletions for superlibrarians] Thanks to Colin’s bravery, we don’t have to imagine. Of those who try to help the family, Whitehouse writes, “They want you to be you again. Happy, smiling Colin Hehir. Would do anything for anyone Colin Hehir. Always up for a laugh Colin Hehir. But the truth is, that’s what’s been taken from you, not just a son. You no longer exist.”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. Whitehouse's world is just off-centre of the real one, skewed with a dusting of magic realism and underpinned by fairy tales . . . This is a thoughtful, kind-hearted and original book ( Emerald Street)

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.” 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.

In the book’s first section, we learn not just of hospital worker Morgan’s death and its effect on his family, but also about his character – that of a young man who was the life and soul, a mirror image in some ways of his HGV-driving father. These details are important, not just because they paint an intimate portrait of the Hehirs, but because Colin and Morgan are everyman figures. 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) 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.”

Colin fought and fought to find out where and why the system had failed, and finally brought about change in the way the police, probation and prison services work together to manage violent offenders. This is the single positive to come from a senseless act. Whitehouse writes in a spare style reminiscent of Gordon Burn, with a pathological attention to the vacancy of murder and grief

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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)

From the moment he heard the news, Morgan’s father Colin Hehir began to keep an extraordinary diary. It became a record not only of the immediate aftermath of his son’s murder, but also a chronicle of his family’s evolving grief, the trial of Morgan’s killers, and his personal fight to unravel the lies, mistakes and cover-ups that led to a young man with a history of violence being free to take Morgan’s life that night. Most weeks, I’m in the habit of looking at a trial list that details the cases at the central criminal court. It’s called “What’s on at the Old Bailey”, as if it’s a section in a listings magazine. For a while, some years ago, nearly all the trials were terror-related, foiled Islamist bomb plots or hate crimes. Recently, however, as in all criminal courts across the land, the listings have returned to their single depressing theme: young men stabbing and killing other young men on Britain’s streets. 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. 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. 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.”

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This empathy lets us understand all too keenly their hellish experience. “Today you bury your child,” writes Whitehouse of Friday 11 December 2015. “Were a parent to name their greatest fear, it would surely be this. But it’s bigger than fear. Fear suggests something to be conquered, a mountain in your mind. But there is no terrain to burying a child. Nothing to grip hold of, nothing to find foothold in. It can’t be overcome because it doesn’t have a summit.”