Veteran journalist and prize-winning author Robin Adair has died aged 87. Robin was a wordsmith with a great sense of humour and loved nothing more than a good pun.  This was on show every week for l5 years in his witty column Round Robin Adair  in The Australian Women’s Weekly.

He began his career at 15, while still at school, writing stories for the old news magazine The Bulletin.  He went on to be a star reporter on The Daily and Sunday Telegraphs. He was then head-hunted to join the Weekly, where he was the only male reporter among a bevy of beautiful and smart females; among them best-selling author-to-be Di Morrissey and in later years Mary Moody, who went on to become a TV gardening star and author. Robin was also a keen gardener and had an orchid named after him  —  or so he claimed.  But it could well have been a bit of his inherited Irish blarney.

In the late l950s and 60s, he also edited the baby-boomers’ magazine Teenagers’ Weekly  (a supplement in the Weekly).  For the Weekly, he invented board games and many contests  —  some called on readers skills in sketches and puns. One such was the popular Egg-Words, drawing several thousands of entries. Among many winners were Eggsodus, Charles Deggaule, and Eggsposure.

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 could keep audiences hanging on a punch line for at least half an hour. He also 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.

In retirement, he penned several colonial-era crime novels. His first, Death and the Running Patterer, won the inaugural Penguin Most Wanted competition for new Australian crime fiction and was short-listed in the Best New Fiction category in the 2010 Ned Kelly Awards. When his publisher asked for more sex in his next novel, Robin replied:  ‘Well, now I’ll have to go home and practise.’ His second novel was The Ghost of Waterloo. 

 His third, 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 and radiation and chemotherapy treatments for a cancer he thought he’d beaten 20 years before.

Robin Adair is survived by his wife, journalist Julie Kusko, his daughters Kristin and Sherry, four grandchildren and one great grandchild.