HELEN TAYLOR

Rugby is a world built on values. You hear them often — tradition, loyalty, honour, respect — but you only truly understand them when you see them lived. So when I began writing Die Trying, I faced a question that mattered deeply to me: How do you write crime fiction inside a world built on honour — without breaking the very values that make that world special?

Being welcomed into that world, I realised something important. Rugby is hard — physically, emotionally, historically. But it is also gentle. It is built on values that are lived, not spoken: tradition, loyalty, honour, respect. I saw those values in the people I met. I felt them in the way I was welcomed. And I carried them with me when I sat down to write Die Trying.

There’s a point in every writer’s journey where you stop waiting for permission and start stepping into the identity you’ve been building. For me, that moment arrived somewhere between releasing Don’t Die For Me, Argentina, and publishing Thai Die: How a Year in Thailand Turned into a Thriller Novel from the new The Story Behind My Stories series and preparing the pre‑order for Die Trying. That is when I found the courage to leave my job and a 34 year career in IT to be an Au