HEADLINE HALLIDAY

Headline Halliday is a reporter for the Daily Courier.

That is apparently a national newspaper based in the United Kingdom. Certainly the scope of Halliday's range is country-wide even though apparently his headquarters is London. For that large periodical, Halliday operates as 'the Crime Reporter' (in caps, no less). 

Halliday is not a spy and it can be easily debated either way whether this young looking eager journalist with a pipe perpetually clenched between his teeth should have his two short adventures recounted in this compendium. On the surface both of these tales deal with criminal activity. It is when looking a tad deeper that the international aspect shows up, especially when espionage joins in, enough so Halliday was invited to join the group here.

Halliday is a tall, very slender man likely in his mid-30s sporting fairly short slicked-back dark hair. He is decidedly a snoop and not the least bit worried about walking into the den of thieves to gather information, even doing some stealing of his own from them.

He has a sidekick/photographer named Chick Farrell who joins him on both his adventures, calling Halliday 'Boss'. Having a skilled shutterbug constantly on hand is a valuable thing for any newspaper reporter wanting to make a name for himself (picture being worth that grand of words and all) but Farrell shows himself to be very handy with a revolver as well as a camera, shooting the tire of a vehicle they were chasing. It is interesting, though, that I only saw a camera in his hands one time and even then it did not look like him.

I went back and forth for several days debating whether to include this series. Obviously I chose 'yes' since it is here. That was decided on two points. First, the crimes that Halliday and Farrell chased stories on were international in nature and a couple of the bad guys they ran into looked every bit of foreign agent as you could without wearing a sign. Second, the adventures were told to us in a magazine called 'Secret Service Series', dedicated it would seem to telling, well, secret service stories - this being British Secret Service, aka spies and spy-hunters. Besides, having reporters go up against enemy agents and international riff-raff is a well-worn trope.

We learn very little about either Halliday or Farrell in the very short amount of pages their adventures fill so there is not a whole lot more I can say about it except that what I read was not very impressive and apparently the public thought the same as the entire magazine was here and then gone quite quickly.