Mark Singer, a staff writer at The New Yorker from the age of 23 who extended the magazine’s franchise of rich reporting and witty prose about offbeat, complicated and quintessentially American characters, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 75.
The cause of death, in a hospital, was cancer of the salivary gland, his son Tim said.
Mr. Singer wrote urbane “Talk of the Town” pieces for the front of the magazine, reflected on serious national matters like the Affordable Care Act and did a hitch traveling the country as the correspondent for the “U.S. Journal” column.
But he was best known as a profiler. His subjects included the magician Ricky Jay, whom he called “perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive”; a set of four doorman brothers in New York; and a braggadocious real-estate developer, Donald Trump, years before he ran for office.
“He came out of the tradition of A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell and Calvin Trillin, which is to say he combined meticulous reporting and a very distinctive comic voice, which is extremely rare,” David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, said in an interview.
An Oklahoma native, Mr. Singer moved back to the state for an immersive series of articles in 1985 that became a book, “Funny Money.” It is about a small suburban bank that wildly pumped up its balance sheet during an energy boom, led by a buffoonish cast of executives, including one who wore Mickey Mouse ears to work.
A 2005 collection of Mr. Singer’s profiles, “Character Studies,” was subtitled “Encounters with the Curiously Obsessed,” a description that matched the author himself.
The book included pieces about a group of Texans searching for the missing skull of Pancho Villa and a family of fanatic California farmers, the Chinos, who grew vegetables for the chef Alice Waters of Chez Panisse (who happened to be married to Mr. Singer’s brother Stephen).
“Singer’s voice is pitched perfectly to the register of The New Yorker: cool and intelligent, with a wry and artful skepticism uncorrupted by cynicism,” Jeff Macgregor wrote in The New York Times Book Review. “Neither aloof nor Olympian, he maintains instead an efficient distance from his subjects. He is a terrific reporter, with a receptive ear for dialogue and a painter’s eye for the salient detail.”
The collection included Mr. Singer’s 1993 profile of Mr. Jay, with accounts of his performing mind-boggling card tricks and memory feats, which Mr. Singer witnessed over a two-year acquaintance.
“He has small hands — just large enough so that a playing card fits within the plane of his palm,” Mr. Singer observed. “There is a slightly raised pad of flesh on the underside of the first joint of each finger.”
He was much less stoked to be assigned by Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, to profile Mr. Trump in 1997.
Observing him over several months on construction sites, in his Trump Tower office and on a private plane, Mr. Singer concluded that Mr. Trump, in the period before he became a reality TV star, was a man “who had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”
“That profile,” Mr. Remnick said, “got everything about Trump 20 years before he ran for president: the vanity, the casual cruelty, the outsized selfishness. It was all there.”
The profile was included in “Character Studies,” and after the Times review mentioned it, Mr. Trump wrote a letter to the editor attacking Mr. Singer as “not born with great writing ability.”
Mr. Singer sent a mock thank you to Mr. Trump for the publicity, which apparently bumped his book higher on the Amazon book charts. He also enclosed a check for $37.82, “a small token of my enormous gratitude,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump returned the letter with an all-caps note at the bottom, reading, in part, “MARK — YOU ARE A TOTAL LOSER.”
Mr. Trump also cashed the $37.82 check, Mr. Singer later said. Mr. Singer framed a photocopy of it for his apartment.
In 1999, Mr. Singer took on the challenge of solving the mystery of Joseph Mitchell, the magazine’s revered, Joycean profiler of New York eccentrics, who came to the office for 32 years without publishing a piece after 1964. Mr. Singer, who never quite solved the reasons for Mitchell’s epic writer’s block, quoted Philip Hamburger, a friend of Mitchell’s: “Why didn’t he write more? Well, he wrote enough.”
Mark Jay Singer was born on Oct. 19, 1950, in Tulsa, Okla., the middle of five children of Alexander and Marjorie (Teller) Singer. His father ran an oil and gas business, Singer Brothers, which had been founded by his own father and an uncle, whose family members were Jewish immigrants from Russia.
Mr. Singer attended Yale, where he found a mentor in William Zinsser, a nonfiction writing teacher whose classic guide, “On Writing Well,” preaches cutting clutter from sentences and choosing the precise word. (He also first introduced Mr. Singer to Mitchell’s work.)
Mr. Singer received his bachelor’s degree in English in 1972. Two years later, he was hired by The New Yorker, at a time when the magazine offered an on-ramp to promising but inexperienced young writers, who sank or swam by writing unbylined pieces for “The Talk of the Town.”
Mr. Singer married Rhonda Klein, a lawyer, in 1972. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage, to Caroline Mailhot.
Besides his son Tim, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Lisa Brody; his sons Jeb and Reid, also from his first marriage; a son, Paul Mailhot-Singer, from his second marriage; two grandchildren; and his siblings George, Stephen and Sandra Anderson.
Mr. Singer is also the author of “Citizen K: The Deeply Weird American Journey of Brett Kimberlin” (1996), an expanded version of a New Yorker profile of a drug smuggler, murder suspect and media manipulator, that was a finalist for a National Magazine Award; and the collection “Somewhere in America: Under the Radar with Chicken Warriors, Left-Wing Patriots, Angry Nudists and Others” (2004).
The New Yorker writer Ian Frazier, who shared an office with Mr. Singer when both were tyros, recalled that his colleague and friend once buttonholed William Shawn, the magazine’s famously reserved former editor, at a wedding reception. Mr. Singer told Mr. Shawn a long-winded anecdote about his own first wedding.
As the editor seemed to recoil, searching the ceiling, Mr. Singer itemized an elaborate menu he had requested from a Jewish caterer — bagels, herring, etc. — after which the caterer said, “So far, you’re giving them nothing.”
Laughter ensued.
“Mark and I,” Mr. Frazier said, “would talk about, What is writing? That’s writing,” he said of Mr. Singer’s lengthy tale delivered with confidence to a defensive audience. “When you can sense a real wind and just keep going with it.”
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