David White House | “Every day these things happen to ordinary, normal people, but their stories are rarely told”

On Halloween night in 2015, Morgan Hehir was out with friends in his hometown of Nuneaton when they were attacked by a group of strangers. Hehir was stabbed in the heart and lungs and died hours later. He was 20 and worked at the local hospital, a talented graffiti artist who dreamed of building a life by the sea.
Immediately after Hehir’s murder, his father Colin began writing a diary, describing his family’s evolving bereavement, the eventual murder trial and his personal struggle to expose the shocking fact that a young man with a of violence was free to take his son’s life. It was reading this will that led novelist and screenwriter David Whitehouse, also from Nuneaton, to use it, with the blessing of Morgan’s family, as the basis for About a Son: A Murder and a Father’s Search for the Truth (Phoenix). A gripping mix of reportage, memoir and true crime, and the first non-fiction book from Francesca Main’s new Phoenix imprint at Orion, it’s one of those titles that excels at defying categorization. And yet, if ever a book made clear the harsh human reality behind the words ‘true’ and ‘crime’, this is it.
In January 2020, Whitehouse received an email from Claire Harrison, a reporter he knew on the Nuneaton News. She had covered Morgan’s murder and his father’s search for the truth about the individual and systematic failures that led to his son’s death. Colin had recently sent her the newspaper, hoping to get an opinion on it. She in turn sent the 100-page document to Whitehouse. “You can spend two years writing a novel, trying to figure out the emotional truth of a character, and you can fail, as I have in the past,” Whitehouse tells me when we meet at his publisher’s offices. . “That single document was so open, it was like looking into a well of truth. But I didn’t feel qualified to tell a man what to do with his grief. So it just sat on my desk.
Three months later, Colin contacted Whitehouse directly to ask what he thought of the journal. “He had no other goal in mind than to get Morgan’s story told somehow.” The two then spoke on the phone for an hour. “The next day, I called him back and said, ‘I have an idea if you let me explore it.’ And Colin immediately said yes. He put complete trust in me and gave me artistic license to do whatever I wanted.
Whitehouse’s idea was to try to tell Morgan’s story by putting the reader in his father’s shoes. “That seems a little high, but I also wanted to somehow translate the pain and loss of her personal experience into a universal experience; to tell Colin’s story, but also the story of his family and the town, which I think is so important to understanding what happened to Morgan. Whitehouse rewrote the first diary entry and sent it to Colin, who gave him permission to continue. Over the next few months, the two men texted and talked on the phone regularly, and from those conversations, Whitehouse was able to add color to the story.
A story in three partsDivided into three parts—”Loss”, “Justice” and “Truth”—About a son is exceptional, and not just because its beating heart stems from the living testimony of a man who had “never written anything but a shopping list”. It’s also notable for the way Whitehouse, as a professional writer, used his craft – including an instinctive and brilliant use of second-person voice – to write something transparent, where it’s impossible to tell. where Colin’s voice ends and The Whitehouse 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 has already been planned. “There is a version of this book that is exactly that. But we always wanted to make it more than just a conventional retelling of history. I never met Morgan but I wanted About a son to reflect it in a way that another kind of book wouldn’t.
The fact that Whitehouse is himself from Nuneaton adds to the surprising truthfulness of the book. While writing it, Whitehouse returned to the city to spend time with Colin and his family. “We stood 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 father on the very spot where he collapsed, and it was all the more powerful that even though I left town a long time ago, I knew this exact location.
I ask Whitehouse what his hopes are for the book once it’s published. “The only goal is for people to know Morgan’s story. The whole book revolves around when Colin and his family leave the trial, not feeling that justice has been properly served. And contrary to what people imagine watching TV series, no one was 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 underfunded institutions operating in times of austerity. “This is what these things look like. They look like Morgan,” says Whitehouse.
You might balk at reading such a dark story. But despite its dark subject matter, there are moments of sunny levity. A week after Morgan’s murder, the family decides to light and launch Chinese lanterns from their garden in his memory. But the lanterns crash to the ground and set the grass on fire, and suddenly everyone starts laughing because they know Morgan would have found that funny too.
I tell Whitehouse how much I loved this light and shadow, and the sense of brilliant humanity that pervades the book. It was a way, he says, of trying to capture a true meaning of the Hehirs and their rootedness. “Colin and Sue are funny people. And Morgan too. I watched Morgan in their home videos, and he has this very distinct laugh. It’s like he’s going to keep laughing forever. In April, when copies of About a son reach bookstores, Morgan’s photo will adorn every cover. And by telling his story so skillfully, Whitehouse brings it to life on every page, too.
The hardest part of writing the book, Whitehouse tells me, was giving the finished draft to Colin. “Before anyone else read it, including my editor Francesca, I had the book printed and bound with a mock cover. I went to Colin’s and sat with him for several hours, unable to get it out of my bag. I was terrified because I might have thrown a grenade. I had written so intimately, not only about the murder of his son, but also about his relationship with his wife and with his sons. I remember my hand shaking when I finally plucked up the courage to pull it out of my bag. It was a Friday, and I hadn’t slept all weekend. On Monday, Colin called me and said, ‘It’s okay.’ And that was enough.”
Extract
You will cross the road where it happened. A few yards behind you is a large fence behind which the knife used to kill Morgan was found, but inexplicably, and as you will learn in court, not until days later. You will stand there so calmly, in such a measured way, that it will be beyond anyone watching this clip to comprehend when you upload it to Vimeo that you are standing where your son was fatally stabbed by men whose steps you have just traced. And those watching will look at your face and see the desire to find out exactly what happened to Morgan that night burning so violently it’s hard to look at him for long.