Author wrote bestseller inspired by 1831 death reported in the Herald
By Julie Kusko Adair
ROBIN JAMES ADAIR: 1936 – 2023
It really does pay to read the Sydney Morning Herald thoroughly – as Robin Adair, found out. It was the Herald which set him on the road to becoming a prizewinning author. Robin, who has died aged 87, had a long and distinguished career in newspapers and magazines.
Author and journalist Robin Adair at Hyde Park Barracks in 2009.Credit: Danielle Smith
Always an Australian history buff, in retirement he penned Death and the Running Patterer, a colonial-era thriller, inspired by an item in an 1831 Sydney Morning Herald about a curious death. It could have lived in the bottom drawer forever except for an item in one-time Herald literary editor Susan Wyndham’s column Undercover in Spectrum. She reported that Penguin was running a competition for original, unpublished crime novels.
Robert Sessions, Penguin’s Publishing Director in Australia, was one of the judges. Once he’d overcome his shock at being confronted with a manuscript bashed out on a World War II portable typewriter, Sessions said: “Robin’s carefully researched, and beautifully constructed novel was a breath of fresh air.”
Adair’s first novel was described as “beautifully constructed” and “a breath of fresh air”.Credit: Penguin
It was also full of tongue-in-cheek humour and what one reviewer called “dollops of trollops”. Robin won the inaugural Penguin’s Most Wanted prize and was shortlisted in the Best New Fiction category in the 2010 Ned Kelly Awards.
When Sessions asked Robin for more sex in his next novel, Robin quipped: “Well, now I’ll have to go home and practise.”
A review of the book in the Herald by Sue Turnbull said: “In Death And The Running Patterer, our hero is Nicodemus Dunne, a former Bow Street Runner transported to Sydney in the early 18th century and now earning a crust as a walking newspaper: he is the eponymous patterer. In his afterword, Adair confesses that Dunne is a figment of his imagination, as are several other key characters in this tale of lust and revenge set in Sydney during 1828.
“Be that as it may, the engaging character of Dunne rings true as he performs his daily rounds delivering the shipping news, commodity prices and intelligence of a new consignment of English willow cricket bats in town, along with the shocking revelation that the British are contemplating overarm bowling. The plot thus serves as a convenient mechanism for bringing a time and a place into sharp relief.
“This Adair does, not only through his characters... but also through his attention to historical detail, including arcane knowledge about the art of typography, the construction of early prophylactics and Sydney’s dire sewage situation. The book may be a work of fiction but the world it depicts seems totally believable. A fascinating first.”
Death and the Running Patterer by Robin Adair.
His second novel was The Ghost of Waterloo, described as an intriguing murder mystery also set in Sydney in 1828. The young settlement is shaken by a daring bank robbery and a spate of murders.
His third novel, The Requiem Club, will be available soon on-line. It was putting the finishing touches to this that kept him going through years of punishing bouts of operations, radiation and chemotherapy treatments for a cancer he thought he’d beaten 20 years earlier.
Adair was born in Sydney on February 16, 1936 when the world was in Depression and heading into the Second World War. He progressed from Haberfield Primary School to Fort St Selective High School where he excelled in English and History.
A gifted wordsmith, Robin began his career at 15, while still at school, writing for The Bulletin. He went on to be a star reporter at The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. He was then head-hunted by The Australian Women’s Weekly, where he was the only male reporter among a bevy of beautiful and smart females. Among them was best-selling author-to-be Di Morrissey, and in later years Mary Moody, who went on to become a TV gardening star and author.
For 15 years, Robin’s quirky humour – he liked nothing more than a good pun – was on show in his weekly column Round Robin Adair. In the late 1950s and ʼ60s, he also edited the baby-boomers’ magazine Teenagers’ Weekly (a supplement in the Weekly).
He later worked at the Australian Financial Review and the ABC, where he was editor of the FM and fine arts magazine 24 Hours.
A pub raconteur, he coined much-used popular phrases. He dubbed the Catholic pontiff’s tour vehicle “the immaculate contraption” long before it was shortened to the boring Popemobile.
Once he retired he was able to focus on something he had always wanted to do – write the great Australian novel.
Adair was a lifelong student of early colonial Australian history, especially police, pubs, crime and punishment. An ancestor was an early Sydney police superintendent; he believed another was a London judge who sent many convicts to Australia.
Robin Adair is survived by his wife, journalist Julie Kusko, whom he married in 1978, his daughters Kristin and Sherry, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
Julie Kusko Adair
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