Hiram Holliday is a proof-reader for a major New York newspaper.
The Sentinel, as a matter of fact.
He is not a spy nor does he want to be nor does he even have any fantasies in that regard. He does dream of traveling at some point in his life to exotic places he has read about and studies and knows a good deal about but he has never done any of that; he has sat at his unimpressive desk in the copy-room and every day reviewed the text about to hit the presses to make sure they are written to the Sentinel's high standards and "for fifteen years [he has] sat on the rim of the Sentinel copy-desk; correcting copy, writing headlines and checking up the work of men of action, the reporters and correspondents and feature-writers who went out into the world and got the news". Certainly not the sort of person one would expect in a compendium of secret agents and covert operatives and the like.
Holliday was often referred to as 'Old Holliday' at the Sentinels even though he "was not yet quite 39, it was just that he had been with the Sentinel so long", a "stick-in-the-mud" who, "if you cut him, he'd bleed commas and semi-colons". Physically, he was also quite unimpressive and largely unmemorable. He was inevitably seen as a rather stoutish little man, odd since he actually was a good 5'10" tall. He was by nature a shy man who did not want to make a scene or be the center of attention or push himself on anyone. But through all those elements of almost insignificance, it was said that "once you knew him well", which few actually did up until now, "you wondered how he had ever escaped you.
That last statement should let you know that there is a whole lot about Holliday that no one else knew, a fascinating man with those "eager, excited eyes behind steel-rimmed glasses", a man who "seemed to miss little of what was going on". "Outside office hours Hiram Holliday was a gentleman adventurer [who had] laboriously, with infinite pains and patience, acquired knowledge in and skills at things that would astonish those at the Sentinel. "He went to fencing salle and shooting school and took lessons in foil, epee and saber, pistol and rifle". He took martial arts classes and became quite good at judo and ju-jitsu and even learned how to box. He joined the National Guard and learned how to drill. He mastered the art of flying a plane. There are just a few of the things he studied during his off hours over those nearly two decades at the Sentinel. He was never a master at any of them, he just knew enough to satisfy himself before moving on something else. It is just that he never had the opportunity - or the need - to use any of these.
Until the $500,000 comma.
It involved a particularly nasty libel lawsuit that the Sentinel looked in danger of losing. Would have lost for certain, it seems, until it was noted that "the placement of a comma in the story in question" changed everything and got the paper out of trouble and saved it a half million dollars. It seems that when the original copy submitted was pulled up for examination, no comma was in the needed place but had been inserted by the clearly discernable hand of Hiram Holliday. In gratitude, the publisher awarded him "$1,000 and a month's vacation with pay". Coupled with all the money he had saved over the years (minus that paid for all those various lessons) and the money he routinely won in head-line prizes, he had a tidy sum and in a flash of wild impulse, he booked passage on the Britannique cruise ship and into a whole new world.
And, oh, the adventures that Hiram Holliday would find himself in!!! Would-be kings and beautiful princesses, frightening Nazi agents and saboteurs and assassins, pompous government officials and embassy delegations, and so on. Such would be the things that Holliday would find himself almost impetuously thrown up against. In typical Hiram style, he did not really so after any of it; he just did not step back from it either.