Ordinary Thunderstorms completes its compendium of cliché by showing corrupt senior officers in the Metropolitan Police helping the assassin to track down the hero. The only character the reader can admire is a lowly woman police officer, as again is traditional.

I am not saying that Boyd is a poor writer who has written a worthless novel — his depiction of life in London without money is finely done. He is worth thinking about because he is a good novelist who, like so many others, has fallen for the tick-box approach of contemporary fiction: good men are inadequate wimps; corporations, evil; police and politicians, corrupt; the upper class, degenerate; soldiers, psychopaths; and women — God bless them — our only hope. 

Many viewers and readers are happy with cartoon characters and want serious fiction to confirm their prejudices. The exhaustion of others explains why intelligent British viewers watch American dramas, such as Mad Men. They at least do not tell the viewer what they must think, like a preacher denouncing sin. 

I should qualify my praise by saying that in nearly all respects Mad Men is a highbrow version of Dallas. Jon Hamm, an actor with matinée idol looks, plays Don Draper, an advertising executive who leads his firm through the social upheavals of the Fifties and Sixties. The women he seduces are, without exception, beautiful. Its success seems no mystery. 

But there is more to it than sex appeal. Some critics argue that it allows modern viewers to sneer at the past. The audience revels in the superiority of its politically-correct morality as it watches powerful men judge women by their looks and tut-tuts as it sees Sterling Cooper's executives confine blacks to the roles of shoeshine boys and waiters. I could reply that men who look at a woman's breasts before any other part of her body did not die out in the 1970s, but to get into a political debate is to miss the point.

For all its superficial glamour, Mad Men is convincing as a drama. Even when viewers know that one rarely finds so many well-groomed people in one office, the fates the writers assign to the characters feel real.

In the series, which has just finished on BBC4, Peggy Olson, one of the few women to have broken into New York copywriting, has an affair with a young leftist. He denounces Sterling Cooper for making ads for a southern company that will not hire black workers. Olson raises the colour bar at a corporate meeting and her colleagues treat her concerns with incredulity. There's nothing an advertising agency can do about a client's employment practices, they tell her. This is America in the mid-1960s and business is business. 

Olson accepts what they say, and the plot moves on. The scene is dramatically authentic. Viewers believe it, but anticipate the moment a few years on when Cooper will not be able to ignore prejudice any longer.

If a British writer had the same material, Olson would have delivered a passionate denunciation of racism in perfectly-crafted sentences. She would have resigned rather than accept her colleagues' decision and rushed to the arms of her lover. Draper would have proved that he was not just indifferent to racism but evil through and through, by going on to rape a woman or beat a defenceless man or deliver an obscene speech.

The drama, like so much British writing, would be full of morality but empty of conviction.