What makes writing good or bad?

Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter?

Try this gripping sentence:

The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

Who wrote it? Possibilities include:

Charles Dickens

Sarah Palin

Raymond Chandler

Michael Connelly

P D James

Voltaire

Ayn Rand

Douglas Hurd

The answer (of course) is ... here.