In the world of religion, there are cases to solve and there are history detectives.
Rhett James, an LDS institute instructor in Logan, is a history detective.By diagramming sentences, studying word patterns and listening to his instincts, James deduced that the infamous "Salamander Letter" was bogus long before other scholars.
By listening to the words and wisdom of Russian poets, by studying Russian history and remembering his own Cold War years in the Pacific Northwest, he predicted the fall of the USSR several years before it happened.
And when Valdo Benson came to him and pitched a plan for a Martin Harris pageant for Clarkston, Utah, James ran the idea through his IBM brain and concluded that Brother Benson had an intriguing case.
James set out to investigate Martin Harris.
The result is "The Man Who Knew," a little "musical play" - as James calls it, that has sold out every performance for the past 15 years. Some 350,000 souls have trekked to the Harris grave in the Clarkston cemetery to see the production. They come in busloads, in groups of 10, 20 and 50 - not unlike Europeans seeking out an obscure Passion Play.
This year the show will open on Aug. 15 and run through Aug. 29. Packed houses are expected again at the amphitheater.
The town is already gearing up for the annual festivities and readying accommodations.
But don't try to get tickets.
They were gone by Feb. 1.
"I had a feeling of urgency about `The Man Who Knew,' " says James. "I had a sense of its importance. So I immersed myself in the life of Martin Harris and went to work. Sometimes the muse whispers to your feelings and your mind and you get impressions. You follow your intuition."
Eventually, James would ferret out more motives, evidence and testimony about the "man who knew" than many historians would ever know. Clues led him to more clues, which led him to conclusions.
If it's true that "God is in the details," then James spends his life in seventh heaven.
He loves information.
I remember studying LDS Church history with him at Box Elder High School 30 years ago. By the end of the term I swore he'd personally examined every spoke on every handcart. He had everything on the pioneers but forensic evidence.
He was the dark and dashing young teacher with the name like a dime novel private eye.
It was like taking classes from Sam Spade.
Today, 30 years later, a life of teaching, living abroad and raising six kids has stolen his dash and silvered him up. But the old passions remain.
Get him talking about the expanding universe and he'll thicken the plot with details until it has more lumps than Grandma's gravy.
Speak to him about Wales and he'll not only round up all the usual suspects, he'll round up a bunch of unusual ones for you, as well.
And get him talking about his beloved "Man Who Knew" and it's a little like picking the brain of Columbo. Everything he learned has become a piece of the puzzle. Every tidbit of info is a tiny mosaic of tile on the wall.
If James were an actor, he could star in a one-man show about Harris and answer questions from the audience afterward - as Harris.
"When we went over the patriarchal blessing of Martin Harris, it said his testimony would be taken to tens of thousands of people," says James. "By our calculations, 27,000 people come to Clarkston every year to hear that testimony."
In the end, if Martin Harris had gone through the phone book looking for a super-sleuth to help him out, he couldn't have done better than Rhett James.
Rockford and Sherlock can't touch him.
And Rhett James didn't even charge $200 a day plus expenses.
- For tickets to NEXT summer's production of "The Man Who Knew," write to: Martin Harris Pageant, Clarkston, UT 84305. Tickets are free.