Satan in the Suburbs and Other Stories by Bertrand Russell - 1953

Second Printing stated.

148 p.; ill. Gray hardcover, with gilt lettering to black cloth spine, has minor edgewear and fading, a tiny brown mark to ffep, and expected aging to pages, but is otherwise Near Fine. Dust jacket, which shows some aging and edgewear, including sunning, small tears, chips, and abrasions, is housed in a protective removable plastic sleeve to prevent further wear.
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From the dust jacket:

In his eighty-first year our greatest living philosopher, shortly after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, has turned to fiction. "A few words may be in order," writes Lord Russell, "to mitigate any surprise that might be felt. I do not think that the reader's surprise to find me attempting stories can be greater than my own. For some reason entirely unknown to me I suddenly wished to write the stories in this volume, although I had never before thought of doing such a thing. I am incapable of critical judgment in this field and I do not know whether the stories have any value. All I know is that it gave me pleasure to write them and that therefore there may be people who will find pleasure in reading them. I should be very sorry if it were supposed that the stories were meant to point a moral or illustrate a doctrine. Each of them was written for its own sake, simply as a story, and if it is found either interesting or amusing it has served its purpose."

When the author of Principia Mathematica, A History of Western Philosophy, Unpopular Essays, The Impact of Science on Society (and sixty other books) forsook pure reason, abstract syllogisms, and systematic logic for this "gay and irreverent gambol on the lower slopes of Parnassus," he turned to a cloak-and-dagger world of dark conspiracies and violent vendettas—the realm of Rider Haggard and Monte Cristo. The first story was published anonymously in a British magazine last year, and a prize was offered to anybody who could correctly name the author. Thousands of letters were received and virtually every famous English writer was named, living or dead, from Galsworthy, Shaw and Wells to Maugham and Noel Coward. Not one reader suggested Bertrand Russell!

The English edition of this book of short stories has already evoked extraordinary critical acclaim. British reviewers have compared these mannered, incredible, terse, astringent and utterly imaginative tales not only with the romances of Dumas and Rider Haggard, but with the novelettes of Max Beerbohm, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Conan Doyle. The style is unashamedly old-fashioned; the mood wry, irreverent, and impish; the plots conventional, and orderly, almost Euclidean in their neatness; the prose cultivated, ornate, striking, a refreshing and nostalgic note on the modern ear-like ultra-modern science-fiction with a counterpoint from Candide.

The stories deal with saturnine machinations and strange blood-brotherhoods in the Corsican mountains, with devilish doctors in the London suburbs whose brass name-plates advertise "Horrors Manufactured Here"—with secret oaths and macabre schemes to destroy the world, with Oxbridge Masters who perpetrate black crimes, and strange dons who commit even the unforgivable sin of voting for themselves at elections with press lords flouting moral and legal taboos, and vicars forgetting even the most crucial commandments.

Perhaps only Bertrand Russell, in this playful and satiric mood, could write: I was young in those days and had not that stern devotion to moral principles which enables man to inflict a torture without compunction. Perhaps only our greatest living mathematitian-philosopher, in this ironic vein, writing fiction purely as a lark, could show the Martians first conquering our planet and "then preparing for an expedition of extermination against the equally degraded inhabitants of Venus." Perhaps only the revered "Attorney-General for Reason in our time" could describe the Satanic villain of one of his stories as "the evil prince of the world—for in him, in his malignant mind, in his cold destructive intellect, are concentrated in quintessential form, all the baseness, all the cruelty, all the hopeless rage of all feeble men aspiring to be Titans."

In these diverting tales we find a gay mocker of all solemn morality and a Voltairean view of human passions and motives. The formal eighteenth century Ianguage of a twentieth century philosopher-turned-story-teller adds delightfully to this ironic mood.