THE WORD : Sam Spade, Meet Mr. Green Jeans

When Elizabeth Stromme passes the Burpee display, she’s not just thinking about tomatoes or flowers--she’s thinking about murder and conspiracies.

Seeds and big-buck agribusiness are at the center of Stromme’s first published thriller, “Against the Grain,” whose hero, a former aerospace security expert, gets caught in a deadly corporate conspiracy involving a seed that could mean billions to whoever owns it. Even when members of a friend’s seed-collecting club disappear or turn up dead, he finds it hard to believe that they are being killed for seeds. “It doesn’t occur to him that seeds can also be economic forces that endanger this country’s lifeblood,” says Stromme, an avid gardener and seed collector.

The story starts in Los Angeles, but don’t look for her novel at your local bookstore, unless you live in Paris. Stromme lives in Silver Lake but struck out pitching her book to agents in L.A. and in New York. She had better luck in France, where she met the director of the popular mystery line Serie Noire, the home-away-from-home for Chandler, Hammett and Cain. She outlined her story for him--she’s fluent in French--and he liked it. The rest is mystery.

“Gangraine”--the French title of her book--will be published this fall by Gallimard, perhaps the most prestigious publisher in France (they do Sartre and Camus, as well as the Serie Noire), but Stromme is still hearing nothing but slamming doors in the United States. “Most agents,” says Stromme, “feel that seeds are too weird a subject for a thriller.”