About A Son author David Whitehouse talks to Andy Malt about adapting true stories
David Whitehouse is set to appear as part of our Crime and Consequence talk at the Big Bookie Weekend. Alongside novelist Dorothy Koomsom and crime fiction commentator Ayo Onatade, he will discuss the blurring boundaries between true crime and fiction.
An award-winning author and journalist, David has written three novels. However, with his first non-fiction book, About A Son, he turned to the world of true crime. Adapted from diary entries, the book tells the true story of Colin Hehir’s search for justice for his murdered son, Morgan.
“Sometimes books based on diaries can become formulaic,” says David. “What was unique about this situation was that I was from Nuneaton, where Morgan was murdered. I knew those streets, that town, very intimately. So I could zoom out of Colin’s diary and place the crime and the quest for justice that followed in a wider context, to show it’s not about the state of one terrible event, family or place, but the state of a nation.”
Despite this, David says he was initially unsure about being the person to help bring this story to a wider audience.
“Colin’s diary about the murder of his son and its aftermath found its way to me for no other reason than that I’m from the same town and have published a few books in the past,” explains David. “We’d never met, but he wanted my advice on what to do with it.
“The diary itself is an extraordinary document, an account of the darkest grief from deep inside it,” he goes on. “He wasn’t asking me to write a book about his story, and in the beginning I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel qualified to tell this man what to do with his pain. But the more we spoke, the more I came to realise he’s an extraordinary man, and that his openness revealed things about losing a child - and the justice system - that everyone should know.”
An interesting narrative device in the book was David’s decision to write it in the second person. He explains, “This allowed me to put the reader in the shoes of a bereaved parent, to immerse them in what that must feel like, which I think is the insight that makes Colin’s diary so special.”
David’s next non-fiction book, Saltwater Mansions, is set to be published in June 2025 and is based in Margate, where he now calls home. “It’s a story about a woman who vanished from the town without anyone seeming to notice, and what happened when I went searching for her rather elusive story,” he says.
You can hear more from David at Margate Bookie on Saturday, 5 October at 3.30pm at the Turner Contemporary.