But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.

We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).

The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.

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But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.

The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.

Runyon’s narrator trades in nicknames, neologisms, mock-formality, a language devoid of contractions and a perpetual present tense. When he tells us that “when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing, the guy very often does not come back”, the threat is softened by the stilted idiom — but not too much. The same goes for the cracking line, “I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”.

Comedy lowers the reader’s guard and enables the writer to slip in other things. We get unexpected moral complexity, in the story The Lily of St Pierre, in which a tragic woman suffers a death “that happens to a million dolls before and will happen to a million dolls again”. And there is a truly psychopathic viciousness in Sense of Humour, which begins with the aptly-named Frankie the Ferocious killing the family members of an associate who played a practical joke on him, and gets worse from there.

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Runyon used comedy as a balance to danger, then; his inheritors developed this, using it as a source of danger, too. In the famous scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s Tommy turns laughter — “Do I amuse you?” — into blood-chilling fear. Like Runyon’s stories, like any good portrayal of the good bad guy — like any good art — it operates in multiple registers.

Connected to this is another strength of Runyon’s good bad guy: he is real. Runyon certainly knew the world he wrote about, both from his work as a newspaper reporter covering sports, politics and murder (which he called “the main event”) and from personal connections: he knew, among others, Al Capone. His portrayal of gangster culture in his stories was an exaggeration, usually for comic purposes, but it’s the authenticity that provides the frisson: Runyon’s biographer said any decent New York detective would recognise most of the crooks in his fiction, from Harry the Horse to Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

And so reading about, or watching, a good bad guy is like a rollercoaster ride: a brush with danger within a safe environment, all the more so when we are strapped to his viewpoint. We can’t help but come round to his way of thinking when we watch the serial killer’s serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter, or read Alex’s own words in A Clockwork Orange. After all, to paraphrase one Runyon character, many legitimate guys like you are interested in the doings of tough guys.

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The guys and dolls come and go in Runyon’s stories, but his world is held together by that constant narrator, a bystander to the action (“I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around”) who rubs comfortably alongside the criminal underworld, even if he is not strictly part of it, and gently expresses theoretical disapproval of, say, kidnapping. “Snatching is by no means a high-class business, and is even considered somewhat illegal.” (Then again, we get the sense that he would help out if they were busy, and occasionally he provides a turning point in one of Runyon’s clockwork plots.) But the intimacy of the first person narrative makes us want Jo-jo and Spanish John and Dave the Dude to succeed — because reading is an act of empathy, but also because we see them within their own community, where they don’t seem so bad at all. They are, like Puzo’s mafiosi in The Godfather, bound by their own code of honour, however twisted.

The novelist Howard Spring summed up this appeal by describing Runyon’s people as “jungle-dwellers, hateful and horrible men and women, who yet please us because they are alive and completely integrated.” Fictional violence, in other words, is thrilling, and all the more so when we’re made to care about the characters dishing it out. In The Sopranos, the most simultaneously beloved and bloodthirsty of Tony’s henchmen was Paulie Walnuts, who murdered more people than anyone else, but was also a comic figure, cladding his furniture in plastic and forever repeating his jokes to impress Tony. In Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, when Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher delivers a theatrical “Whoopsy-daisy!” as he “misses” while chucking his knives at Cameron Diaz’s Jenny, we feel the same sense of uneasily disrupted danger that Runyon detonates in his darker stories.

In capturing the Broadway gangster era, Runyon created it, just as Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age — which operated at the same time but in a different world. But Runyon’s influence goes even further: he prefigures the wisecracking Noo Yawk idiom of countless sitcoms. And by offering a gangster environment that was fundamentally comic in nature, he opened a gap between his creations and the traditional villain for others to fill, and fill it they did, forming characters who flatter our appetite for complexity by being good only in parts.

After Runyon’s death in 1946 — from a lifelong smoker’s throat cancer — a plane was flown above Manhattan and his ashes were scattered over Broadway, the avenue he dusted with his own peculiar genius. It was a tribute befitting either a city grandee or a legendary crime boss — and therefore perfect for the man who in straddling both worlds created his own, and laid the path for ours.

Even amid rising case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths from Covid-19, it’s possible if you look closely to see the first chapters of a new story about Britain and its prospects in 2021 being written. It’s a story of a new Roaring Twenties, a time of national cheer, celebration and even indulgence.

It’s also a story that I find more than a little unnerving.

Ever since the first effective vaccine to the virus was confirmed, optimism about 2021 and beyond has been rising, with financial markets the epicentre of the outbreak. In the last couple of months, I’ve noticed that the closer a person is to the City and financial services, the more likely they are to be looking forward to 2021 as a year when the champagne starts to flow again and the fun resumes.

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That’s a generalisation based on anecdotes, but it’s also borne out by wider evidence from the markets and their related industries. Depending on how you measure it, share prices are now as high as they’ve ever been and the gap between those prices and the actual earnings of the companies concerned as wide as at any point in history.

A lot of that comes down to the most important public policy that almost no politician talks about these days: central banks pouring cheap money into economies to keep businesses and households afloat. All that money has to go somewhere, which means higher share prices, more mergers and takeovers (private equity deals are now at their highest levels since 2007 ). A lot of City types will tell you, in terms, that There Really Is No Alternative to putting money into things like companies and property.

All this will inevitably mean more pay and bonuses for the people involved, money that will, in part and unevenly, cascade out through the economy: UK house prices are up almost 10% in 2020, and London estate agents are full of excitement about next year.

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Economic exuberance isn’t wholly irrational. After all, as long as mass vaccination programmes go OK, there’s every chance of a return to some sort of normal economic life starting in the second or third quarter of 2021. Companies that have survived the long winter and make it to Easter may find a good number of optimistic customers with cash on hand and a desire to spend it.

Household finances are another thread in the story of optimism and hedonism in 2021. For some people, 2020 has been annoying and inconvenient but also quite financially advantageous: if you have the sort of job that involves sitting at a keyboard and talking to people on Zoom and you’ve kept that job through the pandemic, you’re probably better off than you were a year ago, because your costs have fallen. No more commuting, no more Pret sandwiches, no more drinks after work.

Andy Haldane at the Bank of England reckons that adds up to £100 billion in extra savings piled up, money that could start to flow in 2021 as the Zooming class starts to spend at least some of their week back in the office and start feeling confident enough to go out to dinner, buy a new car, take a holiday.

That’s the economics. The politics of the New Roaring Twenties are more obvious still, and start at the very top.

Boris Johnson is a booster. The Prime Minister thrives on, trades on, optimism. His life and career have been built on telling people — voters, colleagues, friends — stories of how things will be better, if they only just let him have his way. Throughout the pandemic, he has been visibly desperate to tell another story of the sunlit uplands that await us when the darkness finally passes.

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So it is no insight to say that the PM will want to tell a story of a new “golden age” for Britain, with Brexit “done” and the pandemic fading in the rear-view mirror. His legacy, his possible re-election and his personality — a war between depression and exuberance — demand that 2021 is a year of celebration that buries the memory of 2020.

My suspicion is that a lot of voters will want to buy what Johnson will be selling next year. As I wrote here before Christmas, a fair chunk of the electorate has given him and his Government the benefit of the doubt during a bad year for Britain. Imagine what his ratings could look like in the summer if growth is rebounding, consumer spending is booking and the sun is indeed shining again.

The other significant players in the narrative of national happiness are found in the media. Fleet Street isn’t what it used to be, but it still matters, and some of its players are itching to tell their readers a tale about a new era of jubilation and consumer spending on stuff their advertisers sell.

So what am I worried about? What’s the problem with a national mood of optimism and good cheer? Well, to be very clear, I’m not making a political point here: I’m a tiresome, equivocating centrist who really doesn’t take sides in contests between parties. I have no view on whether the sun should shine on Boris Johnson rather than Keir Starmer. Nor am I a professional doom-monger, though I accept it’s rarely difficult to distinguish between me and a ray of sunshine.

No, what worries me is that the national story of the New Roaring Twenties won’t actually be a national story. It will exclude and overlook a significant number of people, and in so doing store up more trouble to come.

Simply, the fact that people who read upmarket newspapers, write for newspapers and get written about in newspapers will spend the second half of 2021 going out to dinner in restaurants again isn’t the same thing as a roaring recovery from an economic shock. Yes, it will make those people happy and make them feel like things are getting back to normal. Yes, it will be good for some people who lost their low-wage jobs in hospitality this year, who will find some of those jobs come back into existence. It is in no way a bad thing. But it will be far from enough to address the economic and social harms done by the pandemic and its consequences.

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Those harms include unemployment, some of it structural, thus requiring people to move sectors and places to work again. That means scarring: the older someone is, the greater the lasting damage done to them by unemployment. Women who worked part-time in retail and hospitality, sometimes because they’d secured shift patterns that fitted around children and caring, may face some of the biggest challenges in the new UK labour market.

Low-income households won’t be adding to the release of “pent up demand” next year either. National aggregates for saving conceal big variations: the Zoom classes may have piled up cash, but people at the bottom of the wage ladder ate into their modest savings just to get by.

Poor children won’t see 2021 as a golden year either, even if ministers do the sensible thing and maintain the £20 a week uplift in their parents Universal Credit. Those kids’ educational prospects took a heavy blow during the first lockdown, meaning some will fall further behind better-off peers and never catch up. Some children took physical blows and worse too: some social workers and child protection officials fear abuse and neglect rose largely undetected during 2020.

The importance of place will only grow in an uneven return to “normal”. The experience of previous economic shocks is that bigger, more prosperous places tend to bounce back more quickly than smaller ones with fewer connections and fewer high-skill, high-wage jobs. It’s a statement of the obvious that the pandemic makes those nice-sounding promises to “level up” Britain’s lop-sided economic geography all the more relevant. That also means the cost of failing to deliver on those promises will be all the higher.

Sadly, there is little confidence among officials and expert veterans of regional and industrial policy that this Government has a plan to deliver the rebalancing that has eluded previous administrations. And while it’s perfectly possible that this expert establishment view is wrong, even the PM’s most optimistic fans should concede that his plans are unlikely to smooth out decades of uneven development in a few months, let alone months that fall immediately after the biggest economic shock in peacetime history.

There are all sorts of economic worries that will persist next year and beyond, including some I haven’t even mentioned yet: epic public debt; corporate debt that holds back investment; dismal and uneven underlying productivity; the ongoing search for a post-EU economic model.

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But in the end, my fears about the new Roaring Twenties are social and political, about the way we talk and feel as a nation.

A 2021 where champagne flows in the more expensive bits of London and the PM talks about a new golden age will be a bitter year for a lot of people who feel far, far away from the exuberance of the better-off and better-connected.

In the past few years, such feelings of distance and disenchantment delivered economic and political disruption and outright rupture: Brexit; Corbyn; Trump. Those things, blended with the poison of social media, have created divided and divisive conversations, where both media and political voices take sides and damn those on the other side of the line.

Even from this distance, I find it all too easy to see a post-pandemic Britain where one side cheers and orders another round while scorning the gloomsters who talk Britain down. And between the two imposters of outright triumph and utter disaster, a country that feels less and less like one nation.

There are odd similarities with the situation exactly a century ago. Iraq was under British military occupation, but the British government, just like the Americans more recently, wanted to withdraw its troops. An outside force — then it was Arab nationalists based in Syria — was plotting violence that it hoped might quicken Britain’s exit.

Amid rising doubts about the wisdom of his approach, Arnold Wilson, Britain’s ebullient proconsul in the country, claimed there was nothing to see here. “The Shaikhs and tribes of the outlying districts are everywhere settling down,” he insisted to a former colleague in a new year letter. “The political atmosphere in Basrah is good, in Baghdad fair and improving, and I think even in Mosul things are getting better.” This analysis was at best deluded, at worst deliberately deceitful: a revolt would plunge Iraq into chaos later that year, and the 1920s would be a decade of instability in the Middle East, as a crisis in one country rapidly spread across freshly-drawn frontiers that were no more than lines in the sand.

The revolt that convulsed Iraq in 1920 was a taster of the consequences of three irreconcilable promises the British had made during the First World War, which became apparent over the next ten years. Under pressure in 1915 they had sent Mecca’s ruler Sharif Hussein a weasel-worded letter that recognised his claim to an empire encompassing Iraq and Syria if he rose up against the Turks. In 1916, in the Sykes-Picot agreement, they then secretly pledged a northerly wedge of this same territory to the French, to patch up the entente cordiale.

Then in the Balfour Declaration in 1917 publicly committed themselves to a Jewish national home in Palestine — land that Hussein believed they had already acknowledged as his. During the next decade the British contorted themselves to try to square these promises with each other. The widespread anti-western sentiment, the Arab-Jewish conflict, and Islamism we see in today’s Middle East are all the result.

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The most immediate problem arose from the clash between the promises to Hussein and the French. If you have seen Lawrence of Arabia you will recall that the end of the war left Lawrence’s ally, Sharif Hussein’s son Feisal, in control of Damascus, the city that, defended by Saladin, had defied the crusaders eight centuries earlier. Now the French, citing their 1916 deal with the British, felt it was theirs.

While the French were in no position to oust Feisal, the British tried not to take sides, and Anglo-French relations deteriorated. By January 1920, however, the British had begun to wonder if continuing to sit on the fence was wise.

The British had initially hoped that they could directly govern Iraq, in order to exploit the country’s oil, while buying off the Arabs with independence in Syria. It now dawned on them that whatever happened on one side of the Sykes-Picot frontier would soon happen on the other. Were Feisal’s confident and vocal Arab nationalist supporters able to gain independence for Syria they would set an uncomfortable precedent for Iraq. Moreover the French would be likely to veto British rule in Palestine in revenge.

These factors, together with the growing realisation that sooner or later they would need French support to fight another war with Germany, led the British to decide that they would have to side with their old rivals. In March 1920 news from Damascus, where the nationalists had proclaimed Feisal king of Syria and his elder brother Abdullah emir of Iraq, spurred a Franco-British rapprochement.

At the Italian resort of San Remo a month later, the British and French governments firmed up the 1916 Sykes-Picot deal. Britain got Palestine and Iraq; France: Syria and a quarter share of Iraq’s oil, to compensate her for the loss of the city of Mosul — hers by the 1916 agreement but which the British had seized just after the end of the war.

The precise frontiers of these shard-like new states would be hammered out by Anglo-French teams of surveyors during the ensuing decade. Meanwhile, Syria’s brief experiment with self-government ended when a small French army expelled Feisal from Damascus that July. Its general marched into the tomb of the city’s most famous ruler soon afterwards, and there he is reputed to have declared, “Saladin, nous voici” (“Saladin, we’re back”).

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In Iraq, Wilson was already dealing with the fury following the Anglo-French decision to call time on Syria’s independence. Following encouragement from the nationalists in Syria, that June a revolt broke out, which it took the British 90,000 troops to quell. In doing so they killed over 8,000 Arab insurgents.

As the new secretary of state for the colonies, Winston Churchill became responsible for the country at the start of 1921. When at the same time it emerged that the Arabic translation of the 1915 promise to Hussein lacked any of the disingenuous subtlety of the English original, Churchill’s answer was to put the newly jobless Feisal on the throne in Baghdad. In doing so, however, he had ignored French warnings, and when days later, Arab extremists tried to murder France’s top official in Syria, the French felt they had been vindicated. Anglo-French relations entered a deep-freeze.

The Arab backlash to colonial rule was gathering strength. The Iraq uprising had lasted just six months, but in 1925 a revolt in Syria broke out which went on for three years. The French accused the British of assisting the rebels. While there is no evidence of direct support, it is certainly true that the British did next to nothing to prevent the rebels using territory under their control as a safe haven. They sat on their hands for a simple reason: they knew they would become even more unpopular if they handed over men whom ordinary Arabs saw as freedom fighters, to face execution by the French.

British inertia was the product of a desire to avoid making their position in Palestine any worse. The British had expected to reap Jewish gratitude for their sponsorship of Zionist ambitions, and (just like Jared Kushner today) assumed that the investment the Jews would bring to Palestine would win over the Arabs to their permanent and growing presence. Both hopes proved naïve. Amid Arab enthusiasm for the unification of Syria and Palestine, the declaration of Feisal as king of Syria in April 1920 had led to four days of rioting in Jerusalem, and over 250 deaths.

Accused by each side of favouring the other, the British zig-zagged. To dispel well-founded allegations of anti-Semitism they appointed the prominent British Zionist, Sir Herbert Samuel, as high commissioner. After further riots in Jaffa in 1921, he temporarily halted Jewish immigration.

That was a gesture, since Jewish immigration to Palestine was at that point negligible. So tough was life in the mandate that in some years there were net outflows. But this began to change when tougher immigration policies, brought in by the United States and other western countries in the 1920s, narrowed the options available to Jews trying to leave Europe.

Naturally the arrival of growing numbers of eastern European Jews by the late 1920s created tensions with the Arabs. Jewish access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem was a particular flashpoint. Today the wall forms the eastern edge of a large piazza, but in the 1920s that space was full of Muslim housing, which only a narrow alley separated from the wall. In 1928 the Muslims complained when orthodox Jews erected a screen across this passage to segregate male and female worshippers. And then the following year a protest by radical Jewish youths at the wall led to a riot which spread to the towns of Hebron and Safad. Two hundred and seventy one Jews and Arabs died; nearly 600 more people were injured. And so began a cycle of violence which has yet to end.

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From today’s perspective, however, the most relevant development of the 1920s may be the intellectual response to the humiliation that many Arabs felt after the end of the First World War.

One man who had been closely involved in Feisal’s short-lived kingdom of Syria was a thinker named Rashid Rida, a Sunni Muslim now regarded as one of the founders of the Salafi movement, which now provides the intellectual ballast for violent jihad.

Rida in fact flirted with more liberal ideas while he was in Syria. But following the removal of Feisal, he returned to Egypt where he reverted to the Wahhabism that had shaped his earlier thinking. There, his views would strongly influence an Egyptian named Hassan al-Banna, who came to believe that the unbroken British occupation of Egypt since 1882 and his country’s vulnerability to foreign influence were symptoms of a deep moral decline that only a spiritual revival along Salafi lines might solve. That was the purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood, which al-Banna founded in 1928.

In a world in which sectarianism has driven Sunni and Shia Muslims apart, the influence that such thinking has had in turn on revolutionary Iran’s ayatollahs was huge, and it is they who have now replaced the British as the power behind the throne in Iraq.

Gharbzadeghi — the idea that the west’s influence is toxic – echoed Rida’s thinking. And Khomeini’s manifesto, Islamic Government, borrowed deeply from the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Muslim Brother hanged by the Egyptian government in 1966. A century has passed, but the legacy of the 1920s lives on.