Customer Reviews

Adventures of Hiram Holliday

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I first read this story in probably 1937 or 1938, so I was 12 or 13 years old. It was published as a six-part serial in a magazine, probably Cosmopolitan or perhaps Redbook under the title "A Tale of Six Cities". (What's a 12-year-old doing reading Cosmo? Believe me, it was not like today's Cosmo)There were only three chapters in the library magazines. It was the Methodist Church Ladies Aid Library in a little town in Kansas (real little - less than 800 people) and my mother tended the library every Saturday afternoon. I found the full book in 1946 in the Naval Air Station Library in Pensacola.
Hiram Holiday was a newspaper copy editor, a mundane, totally unadventurous job. My family has been in the newspaper business since 1904 and I could set my name in type before I could write it, so that attracted me at the start. I won't give away the story, but the international maneuverings and desperation of those pre-World War II days is masterfully covered, with Hiram, with his totally unexpected skills and insight, in the thick of it. It should be a movie - directed by Alfred Hitchcock.