Deirdre Cash, who published under the pseudonym Criena Rohan, was born in 1924 in Melbourne. She grew up in South Australian and Melbourne, and went on to attend the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. She married twice, had two children and worked variously as a singer and ballroom-dancing teacher. Ill-health inspired her to pursue her love of writing in the late 1950s. She published her first novel, The Delinquents in 1962. It was followed by Down by the Dockside in 1963. Cash passed away from cancer that same year at the age of thirty-eight.