SOURCE: "The Fast River and the Tranquil Lake," in Observer Review, October 23, 1994, p. 20.

In the following essay, Gerrard contrasts the work of P. D. James and Walter Mosley, focusing on her Original Sin and his Black Betty.

Baroness P D James writes novels that are like reservoirs: pleasant, contained, uninfested, damned up, with the occasional controlled trickle of water releasing pressure. Walter Mosley writes novels that are like fast rivers: out of control, dirty with the discharges of human lives, flooding and parching with the seasons, rushing to a polluted sea. In P D James's fiction, bodies are fished out of the water, which then resumes its customary tranquillity. In Walter Mosley's, corpses are tugged past on swollen rapids, irrecoverable and part of the tide in the affairs of men.

She's white, English, Conservative and conservative. He's black, American, radical and with the dubious blessing of being President...