Bookmarks

THE INFORMER

By Akimitsu Takagi
Translated by Sadako Mizuguchi
(Soho, 257 pages, $22)

t's hard to feel sorry for your average corporate rogue, but Shigeo Segawa is a hapless one. The main character of Akimitsu Takagi's 1965 novel "Mikkokusha" is a twice-failed stock trader who'll do anything, and manipulate anyone, for money. But in this tale, recently published in English as "The Informer," it's events that manipulate Segawa.

Down and virtually out, he is led by friends to a job selling massage machines for a fledgling outfit called the Shinwa Trading Co. It's not exactly a fast-moving item, and Segawa wonders how Shinwa can pay him a suspiciously high salary of Y50,000 a month (apparently a lot of money in 1960s Japan) when he's unable to sell any. His boss soon fills him in: Massage machines are just a ruse; Shinwa's real business is industrial espionage.

Segawa's first assignment is to steal the formula for a lucrative new substance reputedly being cooked up by the Shichiyo Chemical Co. Turns out it's no accident that Segawa was hired for the job: He's old friends with Shichiyo's executive director, Shoichi Ogino, whom he'll have to betray to succeed. No problem; business is business.

But when Ogino is murdered and Segawa becomes the obvious suspect, the plot lurches into a hall-of-mirrors whodunit where it's hard to tell the obvious from the illusory. Ogino had learned of Segawa's spying just before his death and confronted him about it. But who told Ogino? That question becomes the heart of the mystery, and solving it requires all the wits of State Prosecutor Saburo Kirishima, who deftly cuts through a thick tangle of alibis, relationships and subsequent deaths to arrive at the truth.

Reportedly based on actual events, "The Informer" was a bestseller when originally published in Japan. (Takagi, who lived from 1920 to 1995, was a popular postwar mystery writer whose other best-known works Soho Press has also published here as "The Tattoo Murder Case" and "Honeymoon to Nowhere.")

While American readers might get hung up briefly on unfamiliar names, minor editing errors and unexplained customs (pachinko is a wildly popular arcade game something like pinball), Takagi's just-the-facts-ma'am pace brings us swiftly to a clever and surprising conclusion. Hint: Not every scoundrel is a lawyer.

THE SHARKS OF LAKE NICARAGUA

By Randy Wayne White
(The Lyons Press, 221 pages, $22.95)

andy Wayne White is having too much fun in life, and anybody stuck in an office five days a week is likely to put down his new collection of essays feeling very envious.

In short order, Mr. White flies a fighter plane, gets in plenty of fishing, travels the world and rescues golf balls from a lake thick with alligators. Along the way, he invariably meets decent, friendly people who can't wait to share a drink or a meal with him.

A former Florida fishing guide, Mr. White is the author of the Doc Ford mystery series and a collection of travel essays, "Batfishing in the Rainforest," that was published in 1991 to wide critical acclaim. He also wrote the "Out There" column for Outside magazine for many years, from which these stories have been taken.

A gentle humorist, Mr. White holds his own as a fine narrative writer. Leaving the town of San Carlos, Nicaragua, on a boat ride to the Solentiname Islands, he writes: "For a time, as we chugged along in the pranga, a dugout canoe flying a square black sail stayed with us, running before the wind. Looking back, I could see how small San Carlos is: ledges of rusted tin and a red water tower interrupting the great encircling darkness of Lake Nicaragua. Before us, the Solentiname Islands appeared as a small dark flotilla: tree islands the size of ships."

Mr. White trekked to Lake Nicaragua, which he describes as the twentieth largest lake in the world, in hopes of landing a landlocked bull shark. He fails, which is part of the charm of these essays. Mr. White doesn't always come home with a lunker, or anything for that matter. Like the rest of us, he sometimes gets skunked.

But that's fine. There are lots of other good things to do, such as joining the Medan Hash House Harriers in Medan, Sumatra, for a 10-kilometer run. It turns out that the Hash House Harriers have chapters around the globe, all dedicated to beer drinking, socializing and the occasional jog. Perhaps the group's most outstanding quality in Mr. White's eyes is that visitors are always welcome. To join, state the guidelines, a new member must prove he or she "is not punch happy, can sit on ice, jump on trains, buses, horse floats and drink out of a running shoe." Mr. White clearly qualifies on all counts.

MRS. GREENTHUMBS PLOWS AHEAD

By Cassandra Danz
(Crown, 224 pages, $12.95)

ost garden books present lush fantasy landscapes of tightly clipped boxwoods, pristine ponds and weed-free flower borders. Only a precious few give us the down and dirty on the less photogenic conditions that disease-and-bug-bearing nature--and bone-headed humans--inflict on real suburban backyards.

"Mrs. Greenthumbs Plows Ahead: Five Steps to the Drop-Dead Gorgeous Garden of Your Dreams," now available in paperback, is such a book, written with wit and good sense by New York gardener and comedienne Cassandra Danz. She proclaims that most gardens are flawed at best--victims of badly placed shrubs planted by clueless developers and of tacky views of the neighbor's rusted shed--and suggests, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that the best remedies to these blights may be 12-foot walls and dynamite. And she hints that some atrocities are actually the fault of her dear readers--should they, for instance, favor such common, garish colors as "vampire" red in their flower beds, which makes her think of "the Christmas edition of a Victoria's Secret catalog."

That said, Mrs. Greenthumbs offers more than just her amusing and curmudgeonly opinions. She also provides a wealth of quirky, practical advice, much of it for the inveterately lazy gardener (and aren't we all?).

She shows how to build an attractive garden path that's half as shallow, and thus half as much work to make, as those recommended in less relaxed garden tomes (the secret is sweeping dry cement into the cracks and spraying with a hose). She explains how to make a stylish arbor using pipes and twining vines. And she encourages readers to be inventive when dealing with ugly features that former owners have inflicted on their homes. In her own yard, for example, she transformed a beat-up cement patio into a Tuscan-style pergola by painting it brown, building a simple cedar frame around it and planting grape vines.

For those of us who labor at newspapers and worry about the future of the print medium, it's comforting to read about Mrs. Greenthumb's copious and clever uses for yesterday's news as compost, mulch and garden paths. More comforting still is the fact that for all of her cleverness, Mrs. Greenthumbs has yet to find a way to recycle old floppy disks.