I’m reposting this article as it was lost during a website update.

People, events or occurrences things stick with me and no matter what I do, I can’t forget about them.  I can’t forget about three dead men.  They died a few months apart sometime in the late eighties.  They weren’t murdered and they weren’t killed.  All three committed suicide. 

What drew my attention to these men were the circumstances of their deaths.  All three died in the same city—Bristol, England—and they were all working on the same government project.  The first man walked into the sea.  The second hanged himself from the Clifton Suspension Bridge.  The third tied a rope around a tree trunk then around his neck, got into his car and drove away as hard fast as he could until he ran out of rope.  Needless to say, the deaths made the news, albeit not on a national scale.  The obvious questions were raised.  Why did these men kill themselves?  And did it have anything to do with their work?  The questions went unanswered.  The story sunk below the surface as swiftly as the first victim.

Any time anyone mentions Bristol or the Clifton Suspension Bridge, I think about these men’s deaths. 

I had no interest in writing back when these men died, but now that I do, I wanted to answer the questions behind these men’s deaths.  

A lot of my fiction is inspired by real life events, but I don’t like to lift fact and fictionalize it.  These men’s deaths intrigued me, but I didn’t want to go trawling through their lives for a book.  While I’m inspired by real life, I’m squeamish when it comes to using real people’s lives in my books.  Due to the sensitive nature of the deaths, I was especially squeamish.  Primarily, I want to entertain, not offend.  These men were somebody’s husband, son, brother and friend.  I don’t want them reading what is very real to them in a fictionalized venue.  I do this because if I were in their shoes I wouldn’t want something very private to me made public irrespective whether it is public domain or not.

So when it came to writing, We All Fall Down, I used the premise of a string of suicides for the backbone of the story, but that was it.  The book is set in the affluent Marin County north of San Francisco and the work the victims were involved in is completely different.  I didn’t research these men’s deaths or their circumstances at the time.  Instead I preoccupied myself with the reason for anyone to commit suicide.  I suppose this is a sensitive subject for me seeing as I’ve known three people to commit suicide.  While I was searching for reasons, a couple of unrelated news stories provided ample motive for people to kill themselves or have the world believe they’d committed suicide.

Seeing as dead men can’t tell tales, I inserted a character with a similar background to my own to unearth the reasons.  I’m a mechanical engineer by trade and through my middle to late twenties; I worked as an independent contractor to a number of firms.  Although, I was one of the team, I was an outsider.  Office politics and rumor floated just above my stratosphere.  Every now and then, I’d catch a snippet that explained the office dynamic.  In We All Fall Down, Hayden Duke is hired on short contract to help a firm finish a hush-hush engineering project after one of the employees commits suicide.  He knows there’s something up at the firm, especially when several other employees die.  He takes an active role after witnesses the death of his college friend and the person responsible for getting him the contract position.

I didn’t set out to answer the question why three men killed themselves in Bristol, just examine the reasons why.  I’ve invented a story to satisfy my curiosity.  For whatever reasons were behind the deaths, I hope these men are truly at rest.