Roger Longrigg was born in
Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a
brigadier. He lived as a child in the Middle East, where his father was stationed, but returned to England to study at
Bryanston School. He then read History at
Magdalen College, Oxford. After completing his degree, he started working for an advertising agency in 1955, before writing two comic novels,
A High-Pitched Buzz (1956) and
Switchboard (1957), based on his experiences there. Both were published under his real name. In 1959 he married, and decided to become a full-time writer, adopting different styles and pseudonyms to suit different audiences. He published under eight pseudonyms. Longrigg appears to be the first writer to turn
Jane Austen's fiction into erotica, with
Virtues and Vices: A Delectable Rondelet of Love and Lust in Edwardian Times (1980), a bawdy, comic rewriting of
Persuasion set a century after the original version. He wrote the novel under the pseudonym Grania Beckford. On another occasion, as Frank Parrish, he was awarded the
John Cheever mystery writers' prize for a first published thriller, creating some embarrassment when it was revealed that in fact it was his 20th published book. A later novel,
Mother Love (1983), credited to Domini Taylor, was adapted into a
TV series of the same title in 1989, starring
Diana Rigg and
David McCallum. Longrigg died in
Farnham, Surrey, at the age of 70. His
New York Times obituary says that he was married to "the novelist Jane Chichester", and that they had three children. In
Christopher Fowler's article about Longrigg, he says that he has not been able to find anything out about Jane Chichester. ==References==