Anytime anyone mentions Bristol or the Clifton Suspension Bridge, I think about 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 entertainment purposes.  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 their family and friends 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 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 reasons for anyone to commit suicide.  I suppose this is a sensitive subject for me seeing as I've known three people who have killed themselves.  While I was searching for reasons, a couple of unrelated news stories provided ample motive for suicide-or in this case, staged suicides.

Seeing as dead men can't tell tales, I inserted a character with a similar background to my own to unearth the mystery.  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 witnessing the death of his college friend and the person responsible for getting him the job.

I didn't set out to answer the question why three men killed themselves in Bristol.  Instead, I've invented a story to satisfy my curiosity.  Whatever the reasons behind the original deaths, I hope these men are truly at rest.

Simon Wood is a California transplant from England. He's had over 150 stories and articles published and he's a frequent contributor to Writer's Digest. He's the Anthony Award winning author of Working Stiffs, Accidents Waiting to Happen and Paying the Piper. Curious people can find him at www.simonwood.net.