Rebellion is delighted to announce the publication of David Tallerman’s The Outfit: The Absolutely True Story of the Time Joseph Stalin Robbed a Bank for Lenin’s Revolution, a smart and surreal short crime novel coming in spring 2022.
Described as ‘The Russian Revolution meets Reservoir Dogs’, The Outfit tells the bizarre true story of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Lenin’s Tiflis bank robbery in 1907.
Author David Tallerman on the publication:
“It’s always nice to be approached about a project; it’s downright miraculous when that project turns out to be more perfectly attuned to your interests as a writer than anything you could have concocted yourself! Where else but in telling the story of perhaps the most unlikely and momentous bank robbery of all time could I have brought together my passions for history, politics, black comedy, outlandish antiheroes, heist movies, and wild action sequences? The real-life events of the 1907 Tiflis Bank Robbery are by turns bizarre, hilarious, and horrifying, and I can only hope I’ve done them justice; at any rate, I’m eternally grateful to Rebellion and Editor David Thomas Moore for giving me the opportunity to try.”
Editor David Thomas Moore had this to say:
“My life will forever be split into two parts: the time before I knew that Joseph Stalin once coordinated a massive, blood-soaked bank robbery with explosions, mattresses stuffed with cash and a one-eyed master of disguise, and the time after I knew that. I’m delighted that David agreed to bring this absolutely bonkers episode of history to life; The Outfit is tense, slick, smart, ridiculous and absolutely, 100% true.”
Here’s the blurb:
Lies and double-crosses, secret police and explosions, a carriage chase, a mattress stuffed with cash and a one-eyed master of disguise…
In 1907, the revolutionary Joseph Djugashvili – who would later take the name Joseph Stalin – met with an old friend, a clerk at the Tiflis branch of the State Bank of the Russian Empire, for a glass of milk. Over talk of national pride, the spirit of the new century and Djugashvili’s poetry, they agreed the beginnings of a plan.
With the aid of the Outfit, Djugashvili’s hardened crew of “expropriators,” they would pull off the biggest, bloodiest and most daring robbery in Georgia’s history, and ruthlessly change the direction of the Bolshevik revolution forever…
Yorkshire-based author David Tallerman is responsible for more than a dozen books, among them the historical science-fiction drama To End All Wars, thrillers A Savage Generation and The Bad Neighbour, and the fantasy series The Black River Chronicles. His comics work includes the absurdist steampunk graphic novel Endangered Weapon B: Mechanimal Science, with Bob Molesworth, and his short fiction has appeared in around a hundred markets, including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. A number of his best dark fantasy stories were gathered together in his debut collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories. Find out more at davidtallerman.co.uk or follow David on Twitter @davidtallerman.
For press enquiries please contact Hanna Waigh, PR & Marketing Manager: hanna.waigh@rebellion.co.uk.
