Roger Longrigg

Roger Erskine Longrigg (1 May 1929 – 26 February 2000) was a prolific British novelist. As well as publishing some books under his own name, he principally wrote popular novels in a wide range of different styles, using different pseudonyms for each. He wrote the lightly erotic school story, The Passion Flower Hotel, as Rosalind Erskine; Scottish historical novels as Laura Black; spy thrillers as Ivor Drummond; mystery thrillers as Frank Parrish; and black comedies about dysfunctional families as Domini Taylor. His other pseudonyms included Megan Barker and Grania Beckford. He had 55 books published in total.^[1]

Life

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.^[2] 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.^{[3][dead link]}

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.^[2] His real identity was kept secret. One of his most successful novels, written as Rosalind Erskine, was The Passion Flower Hotel (1962), a story of how 15-year-old girls at a boarding school establish a brothel to cater for boys from a nearby school. The mystery surrounding the true authorship of the book was eventually revealed by the "William Hickey" column of the Daily Express. The novel was later turned into a stage musical scripted by Wolf Mankowitz, a radio play, and a film starring Nastassja Kinski.^[3][4][5]

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.^[6] 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.^[3] He also wrote books about horse racing and fox hunting.^[4]

In 1995, the bookseller John Francis Phillimore declared in an interview that Roger Longrigg's horse-racing adventure story Daughters of Mulberry (1961) "is the greatest book ever written in any language by anybody. Everyone who has read it agrees with me."^[7]

Longrigg died in Farnham, Surrey, at the age of 70.^[8] His New York Times obituary says that he was married to "the novelist Jane Chichester", and that they had three children.^[4] In Christopher Fowler's article about Longrigg, he says that he has not been able to find anything out about Jane Chichester.^[2]