File for Record

File for Record is a 1943 mystery novel by the American writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor, published under the name Alice Tilton. It is the sixth of the eight books about Leonidas Witherall, a teacher and writer who looks like Shakespeare and solves crimes because they keep arriving at his house.

The trouble begins at Haymaker's, the oldest department store in the town of Dalton, where Witherall is knocked unconscious while retrieving an umbrella. He comes round in a delivery wagon full of French bread, and later that night, called out during a blackout, he returns to find the store's owner murdered in his own study with a samurai sword left in the body. That makes him both the man who found the crime and the man the police most want to explain it.

Taylor wrote the Witherall books alongside her other series, and they are the more farcical of the two, built on coincidence, mistaken identity and accumulating absurdity rather than on procedure. The story keeps to Dalton and the towns around it, and its plotting runs at the speed of its dialogue.