we have john banville doing benjamin black doing raymond chandler. who is sitting here with me? >> it's banville, of course. i mean, it's just me. i invent these other voices. but none of us is a singular being. we all invent versions of ourselves. >> brown: part of what you do anywhere as a writer? >> yes. >> brown: what attracted you to taking on phillip particular? >> i have been writingince my early teens. he's a wonderful writer, invented a new kind of fiction. he brought the crime novel up to the level of literature and above, also wonderfully entertaining and accommodating. he never despised their writings like many of the authors do. like they couldn't be written by mere more talls. i always hated that. people who are, as chandler said himself, you know, what he wanted to do is write the kind of fiction that it would be very, very good and they would get it. so he didn't write down, he wrote up. >> brown: how do you do it without overdoing it? how to channel his style without making us feel that that's, you know, all we're reading is this sort of -- >> well, when i starte