Purists suggest that noir ended with Orson Wells’ Touch of Evil, a 1958 film based on the book Badge of Evil by Wade Miller, a pseudonym for Bob Wade and Bill Miler, two childhood friends who grew up in San Diego, a city south of where I live in Los Angeles, on the border with Mexico. A film I hasten to add wherein Charlton Heston plays a Mexican cop of all things.

But as your question suggests, noir or neo-noir or maybe it’s post modern noir, has not died. In fact I would argue that noir, which has its origins in film such as German Expressionism and late 1920s American gangster myths (which itself is a carry over from Wild West gunslinger fascination), is today stronger in novels than in film. Partly this has to do with market forces as making a movie costs so much, and are test marketed to death, then having a movie wherein the main characters are doomed or anything but likeable criminals (as in Ocean’s Thirteen) is riskier to make.

Maybe too this crisis of identity, this unsettling uncertainty about our fate that is at the heart of noir, is a sub-conscious response to then end, or at least the tenuous nature, of the American Empire. The single largest military power in the world is knee-deep in a quagmire in Iraq, immigration issues roil our citizenry, racial issues still are unresolved in this country (the Supreme Court recently gutted efforts at attemps to achieve equality and diversity in public education with Chief Justice Roberts glibly proclaiming if you want to end discrimination, do so – as if it were an easy task that this country hasn’t wrestled with for some 400 years) and General Motors, once a mighty engine of capitalism, faces bankruptcy.

I’m not exactly sure what positive discrimination means. Though I take it to refer to where we’ve tried affirmative action measures wherein certain job slots for minorities will be set aside or you get points when applying for work in the public sector for being disabled, a woman, and so on. Well, certainly there has been good results from some of this. And certainly black people in this country benefited from things like the Civil Rights Movement – though most of those gains in terms of law have been greatly curtailed give the rise of conservatives in the last 30 years. And most affirmative actions statues have been ruled illegal or revoked.

So I don’t want to sound like a complainer. I just think I have a healthy skepticism about our progress given the growing gap between rich and poor in this country, our unequal healthcare system (see Michael Moore’s new film "Sicko"), and the demise of unionized labor where we have Wal-Mart being the largest employer in the United States. But what can you do but keep going forward, keep trying.

It might very well be that there will be the great upheaval at some point here in the U.S. How long can we as Americans be consumed with Paris Hilton in jail or what sort of underwear Britney Spears is wearing (not that as a red-blooded he-man I’m not concerned with this issue (ha!)) when as you say, the climate is heating up against America around the world. By great upheaval I mean the populace waking up and exercising the rights they have. We can read and vote if nothing else. How can we have a government where the vice-president operates in secrecy, the president commutes the sentence of Scooter Libby, who was doing the vice-president’s bidding, and we were lied to as a pretext to invading Iraq? Where you have people voting for these clowns against their own economic interests because they are influenced by blowhards like Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly on right-wing radio and Fox TV.

The collection covers a lot of territory in its various stories. From grim gems like Just Surviving Another Day by Detrice Jones (based on her actual teenage years) to light-hearted ones like Laura Lippman’s The Crack Cocaine Diet to even a zombie romp. So, you know, me and Jervery, my co-editor, weren’t concerned with each story being a cautionary tale so much as letting the reader decide what to take away from each story. So for the Serbian reader, I say the same thing. Me and Jervey aren’t trying to hit you over the head with a message but want you to hopefully enjoy the stories in the collection and yes, there are realties inherent in the material, but not lectures.

As an editor, once you’ve sold the idea to a publisher – and in this case, Johnny Temple the American publisher of the Cocaine Chronicles at Akashic, was very enthusiastic about this project -- you of course worry about finding good writers. Fortunately between me and Jervey, we knew most of the people we asked to contribute to this effort. Moreover, and frankly an even bigger concern, was that the writers we chose had to be good, had to be up to the task. They may be unknown to the Serbian public (though I would guess Lee Child is translated there as he writers what are called thriller novels), and even in some cases unknown to an American reader, but that wasn’t a criteria per se. Though of course you want a few so-called big names to help sell the anthology.

But even the better known names in the book are good at what they do. It’s like assembling your crew for the heist. They have to have skill, be adept at their craft, and be able to pull it off on deadline.

My goodness, that’s a very big question. Where would I start? There’s quite a few writers who should be more widely read, some of whom I know, that I feel odd singling out one about another. I would say though James Sallis’ Lew Griffin books (he’s a white writer some thought was black initially because his character, Griffin, who is black, was so well-developed), John Shannon and his Jack Liffey series and for a glimpse of the ‘70s-era crime/ black pulp experience, Donald Goines – particularly his novels Never Die Alone (made as a film with rapper DMX) and Daddy Cool, ostensibly his best work.

As a genre writer, I suppose I’m not so much part of the underground as outsider. As I have no desire to be a mainstream writer. In fact I guess today’s underground would be the writers writing for the internet on blogs and e-zines. Or maybe it’s writers who write comic books and graphic novels, that bastard form of pop literature that is more than just muscular men and big-breasted muscular women (not that there’s anything wrong with that) in Spandex. Witness crime comics series like Brian Azzerello’s 100 Bullets and Ed Brubaker’s Criminal.

I don’t have much of an idea of how man books are translated in the United States. I do know that in the mystery filed, we do get translated works from Japan, Mexico, Sweden, Germany, France, South Africa and so on. At least then I can say in my field there’s a wide range of writers from different countries to be discovered. And I belong to the International Association of Crime Writers, which encourages such cross-pollination.

That’s easy; Bangers. It’s a story about crooked cops, ambitious politicians and deadly gang members (or gangbangers as the slang gores). The quintessential American story of greed, lust and chicanery. Ha!

Wow, another big question. I know Venus Williams beat Maria Sharapova to advance to the quarterfinals at Wimbledon. Seriously, what I know is pretty much what we got here on the news, particularly during the Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian war. I’m not at all clear about the historic roots of the conflict (though understood that in the era of the Soviet-backed Tito dictatorship, a lot of this ethnic conflict was tamped down), even though I have a Serbian-American friend, Slobodan Dimitrov (who is a photographer specializing in labor issues but who’s done publicity shots for me) and we discussed some of this at the time. That Croats were Nazi sympathizers during WWII, land grabs by one side or the other, and what have you. I do recall this powerful image of a POW camp on the cover of Time magazine that shook me And do remember then President Clinton bombing Kosovo and ultimately the accords reached in Dayton, Ohio. Also that Milosevic died of a heart attack I think in his cell at The Hague where he was on trail for war crimes.

Maybe then we need to have a Novi Sad Noir anthology as a way to provide us in the west with a glimpse of the underground Serbia as Serbians know it?