John Guilsher was a quiet, modest man who spent 50 years as an officer and consultant for the CIA. For most obituaries of CIA officers, that's about all the information we get. But the story of John Ivan Guilsher is something special.

For Sunday's Local Life, I was able to recreate an amazingly intricate and riveting espionage case of the late 1970s and 1980s in which Guilsher played an instrumental part. The CIA rarely releases information about specific operations, but the case involving Guilsher and a Soviet engineer named Adolf G. Tolkachev is a remarkable exception.

... Interesting people are still leaving this frail crust of earth. I'm biased, of course, but I thought the most compelling story in the paper today (Wednesday, Feb. 13) was Joe Holley's obituary of Glenn E. Wise, an inventor and official at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Joe has been cultivating a new kind of obit "lede," as we spell it in the news biz, by summarizing a person's character or ineffable qualities, rather than describing his achievements and career. Thus, we learn that Wise "could never leave well enough alone" and that anything all, from a feeding bird to his own breathing difficulties, were "targets of his incessant urge to tinker, to innovate, to improve."

I think this is a fresh, bold approach that allows a reader into a subject's thinking with an immediacy and intimacy that we don't often find in any kind of journalism.

And if you're curious about people who are famous for a minute, then seemingly disappear from the public stage, you might want to take a look at the life of Amber Scholtz, a stunningly beautiful woman who was the It Girl on the embassy and Capitol Hill party circuit, circa 1975. She was so prominent in that high-powered world, in fact, that the Post ran a huge profile of her. She died in Paris in January. Last Sunday's Local Life, in case you missed it, fills you in on the rather surprising and touching turns her life took in the years since.

Anyone who lived in the American West in the spring and summer of 1993 remembers the unexplained string of deaths of (mostly) rural residents. I have a vivid memory of camping in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and thinking about the ways that virus can be transmitted -- while also trying to conserve water. It took awhile, but finally scientists reported that the cause was a hantavirus which came from deer mice, which were all over the place that spring. It turns out that two biologists, Robert Parmenter and Terry Yates, made the connection.

One of the reasons that obits are so fascinating is that adjacent to that kind of news, you'll find stories like these, a woman who started a fabric shop, or a roofing billionaire who fell off a roof. Who needs fiction when fact is so fascinating?

I wrote a Local Life feature for last Sunday's paper on Dorothy Bialek, who with her husband, Robert, was the co-owner of the old Discount Records and Books in Washington. Founded in 1952, the store was D.C.'s first record discounter (the books came later). It was also, according to the family, the first local store to introduce autograph sessions with major artists. The store began out of an abiding passion -- Bob Bialek, who died in 2006, loved classical music and was a capable pianist in his own right.

I began working on the piece on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, after another story had fallen through and had only a day and a half to complete it. By Friday afternoon, I had spoken to all three of Dorothy Bialek's chlidren, one of whom sent me several photographs, including a wonderful shot -- which we used in the paper and online -- from a signing session at the Bialek's Dupont Circle shop. The only problem was that no one knew anything about the photo.

I've just completed a relatively short obituary of an administrative law judge named John Gray. (It should be in the paper on Thursday, Oct. 25.) He had a fairly high-powered, if not exactly colorful, Washington career -- law school grad who spent 12 years as an FBI agent, then 15 years as a top official of the Federal Trade Commission. Finally, he was a Labor Department administrative law judge for 18 years.

When I was interviewing his wife, I learned a fascinating Only in Obits tidbit: John Gray's mother's maiden name was Black, and his wife's maiden name was White. Black and White, of course, make Gray.