Over the course of his literary career he wrote four novels, Jonah and His Mother (1964), A Secondary Character (1965), The Devil is a Single Man (1969) and The Edgware Road (1970), exploring different aspects of Jewish life, and a biography of Sir David Webster, The Quiet Showman (1975), along with several short stories and radio and TV plays.
Phil and Kate met and married in England and had five children, sons Herbert, born in 1924, Norman, Montague and Michael, and a daughter who died at four months.
Montague, who as a teenager had been presented with complete sets of the works of both Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw, decided to become a writer, something he knew Herbert had wanted to be.
Haltrecht attended the Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School, then located in Cricklewood, North London, between 1942 and 1948, before going on to Wadham College, Oxford in 1950 to study law before changing to English, French and Spanish.
Finally he gave in and accepted the job offer serving female customers in his father's dress business, first in a shop on the Walworth Road near the Elephant and Castle in South London and later in Bond Street.
[22][23][24] Two of Haltrecht's novels, Jonah and His Mother and The Edgware Road were banned in South Africa: the first “because of certain passages considered to be incestuous” and the second because it portrayed marriage across the racial divide.
[17] In February 1985, BBC Radio produced his play Unhappy Disturber of Our Peace, about the relationship between the actress Sarah Siddons and the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, starring Dorothy Tutin and Michael Pennington.
[17][28] That same year, BBC producer John Knight asked him to write and present three programmes on the life of D. H. Lawrence called Living at Full Flame, starring Michael Williams.
[30] In 1990, BBC producer Jenny Bardwell asked him to interview Willy Russell and Julian Mitchell for the Open University, and in 1994 he presented A Night at the Opera.
(based on an idea by Beverly Marcus whom he credited as co-writer), about the impact of schizophrenia on family life and written for the BBC's Screen One series and directed by Christopher Morahan, was an immediate success in the UK and Australia, earning a BAFTA nomination.
In 2006, Haltrecht played a small comic role in the children's entertainment show Dick and Dom in da Bungalow, which was successful enough for the producers to keep him in the series.
For his first two novels, Jonah and His Mother and A Secondary Character, Haltrecht won the Henfield Foundation Award in 1967 against established writers such as Bernice Rubens and Melvyn Bragg.
The publication of his first novel was enough to enable him to find his voice, and within a year he had met and fallen in love with the man who was to share the rest of his life, the actor Nicholas Amer.