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These are the facts that sit at the heart of David Whitehouse’s astonishing new work of creative non-fiction, worked up out of diaries kept after Morgan’s death by his father, Colin, and subsequent conversations with the author. And unlike what people imagine from watching TV dramas, there was nobody waiting to hear their story: no microphones, no satellite van, nothing.
He is tormented by powerlessness, not least in a long, fruitless campaign against Apple, which cruelly refuse to help the family – or the police – unlock Morgan’s MacBook to access his music and his photos, because it breaches its terms and conditions.A few metres behind you is a big fence behind which the knife used to kill Morgan was found, but inexplicably, and as you’ll learn in court, not until days later.
It is tender and beautiful, and it is an angry book, a book whose anger is balanced and honed, anger as a tool, slicing through systemic indifference and obfuscation to what is true and right. From the moment he heard the news, Morgan’s father Colin Hehir began to keep an extraordinary diary.Before anyone else had read it, including my editor Francesca, I had the book printed out and bound with a mock-up of the cover. Morgan’s dad, Colin Hehir, began to keep a diary soon after his son’s death – one that chronicled his grief, how Morgan’s death affected his family, and then his fight to get the justice he felt his son hadn’t received, refusing to let Morgan become another statistic, another anonymous victim to knife crime. In the final section, Colin spends years asking the police to investigate their shortcomings in the matter.
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. Weird thing to say, but the author might have invented a new genre of literature here, so unique are the events leading up to the book's publication. He was 20 years old and worked in the local hospital, a talented graffiti artist who dreamed of building a life by the sea. On the court steps, however, there were no media to greet him, no one at all to deliver his statement to. I’ve written scripts for FX, Channel 4, ITV and Sky, and written for lots of newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, Esquire, The Times, The Observer Magazine, Sunday Times Style and many more.Why was Gray allowed to be out and about with scarce supervision when he had been arrested three times in the four months before taking Morgan’s life? 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. Elizabeth talks to David Whitehouse about that process and the profound impact Morgan's story has had on his life. You can spend two years writing a novel, trying to get to 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.
Three months later, Colin got in touch with Whitehouse directly to ask what he thought of the diary.Whitehouse rewrote the first entry in the diary, and sent it to Colin, who gave him permission to continue. The unspooling detail of the next few days and months as the family, like hundreds of families up and down the country, tried to understand the unfathomable pointlessness of the violence of that night, brings their love for Morgan to vivid life. Whitehouse had grown up in Nuneaton, he knew the people and the places that Morgan had known, and having read the diary worked with the family, particularly with Colin, to produce this book, part memoir, part true crime story. Some were in trick-or-treat costume, one as Marcel Marceau in white face paint; Morgan had on a priest outfit.
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