A man is not certain about the reason for his fascination with the concept of suicide. Maybe it was the fact that Ernest Hemingway, to whom he was introduced when a teacher named Mr. Kirk assigned The Sun Also Rises to his ninth-grade class, so interested him that that he subsequently read both For Whom The Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea. When he realized that Hemingway had killed himself in 1961, he came to regard suicide as an artistic achievement. He then began to follow local suicides with considerable intent. Many years later, he found himself composing a novel in which several fictional characters kill themselves in a number of different and unique circumstances. The resulting book is entitled Ordinary Suicides.