Journalists love oddballs. They make our job so much easier and more colorful. Just spend some time in their world, jot down the color of their sky, write it up, and poof - instant story.

Over the years, writing about characters who march to their own drummer has been one of my favorite things. Mark Singer, however, has raised this genre to something approaching an art form while working for 31 years as a staff writer for The New Yorker.

In his new book, Character Studies: Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed, Singer offers a series of often endearing portraits, including those of a former corporate executive turned over-achieving mom, a lunch group of old Texans devoted to finding the missing skull of Pancho Villa and a fan club trying to keep alive the memory of cowboy actor Tom Mix.

There are a few celebrity turns. Singer opens with a brilliant profile of magician/actor/card trickster Ricky Jay, a less successful portrait of Donald Trump and a very entertaining piece on filmmaker Martin Scorsese.

These last two, Singer informs us, were assignments he took somewhat reluctantly from his editors, Tina Brown and David Remnick respectively.

Both profiles are much more in-depth than the standard celebrity interview, in large part because Singer spends so much time with his subjects and does such a thorough job of researching them.

The Trump profile is very good at getting behind the brand name to the vapid, not terribly interesting self-promoter behind the image, but it ends with one of the few false notes in this collection, as Singer describes Trump in his lavish Trump Tower apartment in New York City: "And, most important, every square inch belonged to Trump, who has aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul."

I am no fan of The Donald or "The Trumpster," as he refers to himself. And in the course of the profile, Trump provides plenty of his own evidence of what a smarmy and shallow individual he is. But to write as though one has the ability to peer through the awful haircut and god-awful endless self-promotion and imply the Trump is without a mortal soul seems like a gratuitous and unnecessary twist of the knife.

Singer's considerable talents are better served when he is writing about a worthier subject toward whom he feels an evident affinity.

Nowhere is this more apparent than his profile of the Chino family of Del Mar, Calif., an incredibly hard-working and somewhat eccentric Japanese-American family whose singular vegetables are sought out by such high-end restaurateurs as Wolfgang Puck.

In many ways, Singer is perfecting the kind of profile pioneered by the late Joseph Mitchell, a brilliant writer who also worked for The New Yorker and is the subject of one of the most poignant stories in this collection.

In "Joe Mitchell's Secret," Singer tells the remarkable story of a man who reached the limits of writing about the curiously obsessed.

Mitchell joined The New Yorker staff in 1938 and stayed until his death in 1996. An amazing chronicler of life in the city, he will long be remembered fortwo stories he wrote about Joseph Ferdinand Gould, a colorful, homeless bohemian who hung around New York's Greenwich Village, knew many of the great writers of that period and himself was at work on a mammoth, self-described "oral history of our time."

Mitchell wrote a profile of Gould in 1942 called "Professor Seagull." Then, in September 1964, seven years after Gould's death, Mitchell wrote a two-part profile called "Joe Gould's Secret," a beautiful, sympathetic profile in which Mitchell revealed that the "oral history" did not exist, at least not as a document outside of Gould's obsessive and alcohol-besotted brain.

It was the last story Mitchell ever wrote. In "Joe Mitchell's Secret," Singer describes how this sad but remarkable man regularly showed up for work for the next 32 years anyway, and how The New Yorker - unwilling to do otherwise - kept him on.

Singer describes how Tina Brown once asked Mitchell to cover a big fire at the Fulton Fish Market. He tried but he just couldn't do it. He had reached a kind of intellectual dead end similar to the one Herman Melville described in his short story, Bartleby the Scrivener. Confronted by his exasperated employer, Bartleby replied, "I would prefer not to."

Singer's affectionate portrait of Mitchell forms a perfect trilogy with Mitchell's Joe Gould stories. Let's hope that Singer continues for many years to come and never reaches that same dead end.

John C. Ensslin is a staff writer at the Rocky Mountain News.