He called it the Finder of Lost Loves Christmas Reunion.

With some skepticism I looked up the Van Nuys office of Nick Harris Detectives last week to attend a briefing on the agency’s plans to give us a schmaltzy Christmas.

“Tears will fall, hearts will beat fast, there will be a special joy this Christmas for three lucky persons,” an invitation promised brashly.

Obviously, Milo Speriglio, director of the agency, doesn’t shrink from using the spirit of Christmas to spread his agency’s name. He’s done quite well at that in the past.

Since 1975 the agency’s detectives have been impersonating Santa every Christmas for kids who call in. That got started by accident when a dial-a-Santa service was assigned a number just one digit different from the agency’s. A few kids dialed the wrong number and the word got out that the detectives were better than the real Santa.

Since then, millions of kids have called and dozens of news stories have recorded that fact. Speriglio has the clippings mounted on black felt in a large picture frame posted ceremoniously at the agency.

This year Speriglio had a new inspiration. He called it the Finder of Lost Loves Christmas Reunion. The agency is looking for three people who want to be reunited with a lost love. Then it will try to find the missing people in time for Christmas, no charge.

I went along to see how my colleagues might handle it, thinking I’d never get hooked myself.

The agency takes up a large upstairs suite in an inconspicuous building on Kester Avenue, just south of Vanowen Street. Immediately inside the door, there was a small coffee table on which were propped two books, “Marilyn Monroe: Murder Cover-Up,” and “How To Protect Your Life & Property,” both by Milo Speriglio.

Only one other reporter arrived. He was from a radio station.

For a famous detective, Speriglio cut a bit of a mousy figure--slight in build, curly hair, a gold bracelet on his wrist and an almost bashful smile on his lips. He wore a short-sleeved red shirt and a cone-shaped Santa’s cap with a cotton ball at its tip hanging over one ear.

“If you’re going to go under cover and play the role of someone, you have to dress the part,” he said.

He led us past several offices to a large room where several school desks were lined up in rows. That was the Nick Harris Detective Academy, where people who aspire to become detectives take classes nights and weekends.

Speriglio said he would assign three recent graduates of the academy to work with six professional investigators in an assault of manpower designed to make the Finder of Lost Loves Reunion a bankable success.

Briefly, here is how it is supposed to work:

Anyone who has lost track of a loved one, sweetheart or relative, can apply by writing in 150 or fewer words why they need to be reunited.

The agency will accept applications until Saturday, when a panel of 10 judges will chose the most desperate case, the most unusual and one in which the missing person has been gone 20 years or more.

On Sunday, ten days before Christmas, three teams of agents will go to work with an unlimited budget, allowing them to travel anywhere in the United States.

By Christmas the cases will be solved, Speriglio said.

The concept wasn’t especially original, a recent television show having exhausted the genre in one inglorious season.

However, Speriglio, like Geraldo Rivera, was promising to do it live. It did seem a daring challenge.

He said he got the idea last year when a woman asked the agency to find her father. He left when she was a year and a half old and had been gone for 42 years. She wanted to see him again.

The agency tracked the man down in Texas in time for a tearful Christmas reunion, he said.

Speriglio produced agent Diane Evans, who solved that case, to tell the story.

She was a plumpish woman of about 40 wearing a Santa Claus sweat shirt and blue jeans. She looked more like a housewife than a gumshoe.

And, in a way, she was.

Evans said she is the mother of a 19-year-old who “thinks I’m a little strange” and that she used to be a medical assistant before an injury forced her to give up her lifetime dedication to the emergency room.

Seeking a second career, Evans enrolled in the Nick Harris Academy. Upon her graduation, she landed a job with the agency.

Much of the work is as monotonous as a social worker’s, she said. It involves checking records, making phone calls, following the leads in 25 to 40 jobs at a time.

“I don’t know how many calls I made,” she said of last Christmas’s success. “I finally got lucky.”

But she admitted that she became wrapped up emotionally with her client, Carol Gilson.

“A case like Carol’s is like having somebody come in cardiac arrest and sending them out healthy,” Evans said.

All right. Enough.

“If you want schmaltz, I’ll give you schmaltz,” a colleague once snapped when handed a tear-jerker story to write.

Ditto, Speriglio. You win this one.

Just find the people.