There is vision. And with his wonderful negative capability, Marlowe sees both the jacaranda trees and the call houses. It is perhaps the price of living on the fault line where the American dream grinds against the American reality. Living at the end of the Far West, where the American dream ran out of room, no hero has ever been more congruent with his landscape. Chandler had the right hero in the right place, and engaged him in the consideration of good and evil at precisely the time when our central certainty of good no longer held.
Bad writing is easy to spot, and easy to explain, perhaps because there is so much of it.
But what makes great writing better than good writing remains unclear. I have gleaned where Chandler reaped, and I have spent much of my adult life thinking about it, but I have never been able fully to explain how Chandler can do what he does. If you are not fully read in Chandler, this new two-volume collection from the Library of America is a good thing to buy. It is a good selection but not a complete one. In the failing of his powers we are made to realize how vigorous they once were.