The Year - 1959. The place - Inside Russia. The Plot - Kill the Red Dictator.A covert, American agency known as "Bureau X" gives U.S. Naval Intelligence agent Alexis Bodine a new face, a new identity, and a suicide mission -- infiltrate the Soviet government as a spy, work his way up to Stalin, and assassinate him before World War III begins.At the time this controversial novel was published in 1951, I KILLED STALIN was a daring, "near future" thriller, billed by the publisher as a "great fictional account of espionage and high adventure that throbs with the urgency of tomorrow's headlines." It was a high-wire act for author Sterling Noel that polarized critics, who either heaped him with praise and lashed him with scorn (for example, Harrison Smith, the President of the prestigious The Saturday Review of Literature called it "a barbarity...there may be others, besides this reviewer, who wish that it was never written. The book can be used by Russian propaganda to perpetuate the libel throught the world that we are brutalized warmongers." Now it's an exciting read and, instead of being a futuristic thriller, it's an unusual time capsule of post-War America in the throes of the cold war.Praise for I KILLED STALIN"The high adventure reading of the year, possibly even the decade." King Features Syndicate"A rip-roaring adventure novel. The suspense is real." The Des Moines Register"Excellently-conceived and executed plot, a tale so convincingly told that one loses sight of the fact that it is fiction, so completely absorbing that a reader stays glued to the pages to the final word of the final chapter. A grand novel." Montgomery Advertiser"A bang-up job in both action and suspense." San Francisco Call-Bulletin