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

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The fact that Whitehouse is himself from Nuneaton adds to the book’s startling veracity. While writing it, Whitehouse returned to the town to spend time with Colin Hehir and his family. “We stood on the spot where Morgan was murdered; we walked his last steps; we went to his grave. It was an immediately powerful experience to stand with Morgan’s dad on the very spot where he collapsed, and it was all the more potent because even though I left the town a long time ago, I knew that exact place.” 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. 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.

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.” 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) 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) 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. 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.”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) 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.” MOBILE LIBRARY was published by Picador in the UK in January 2015. It won the Jerwood Fiction Prize that same year. 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.

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 Whitehouse writes in a spare style reminiscent of Gordon Burn, with a pathological attention to the vacancy of murder and grief

David Whitehouse's new book, building on Colin Hehir's diaries written in the wake of the murder of his son Morgan, is a unique piece of creative non-fiction

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) 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.