Of seagull sandwiches and something strange in the closet

Back in my Turner Broadcasting days, we were in Florida shooting footage for a rental car commercial. Just standard beauty shots of cars driving over sunlit bridges with boats sailing in the background, etc. The crew and I had to drive from place to place looking for just the right location, so we were stuck in a car for hours with each other. This was in the days before iPods and video players in vans. Imagine! A whopping ten years ago.

We were getting kind of fractious, when the cameraman cut through the grumbles, "I have a little story to tell you, but you have to figure out why it ends the way it does. Only "yes" or "no" questions, and I can answer "yes," "no," or "irrelevant."

Sure. Why not. We're stuck here.

So Don proceeded to tell a long, involved story that involved a seagull sandwich and a suicide. Our job was to figure out the reason for the suicide. It took a solid two hours for five of us to come up with the solution, with much hilarity and confusion along the way. And - oh, lucky crew! - Don had a host of such tales, so he kept us occupied the whole time. One dealt with a woman who murdered her sleeping husband after she found something in the closet (and no, it had nothing to do with another woman). Another was about a dead parachutist found naked on the beach. There were more such stories, but I can't remember them now.

Has anyone else ever played this story-based guessing game? I can't remember what the stories are called - they're kind of like riddles, but I think there's a specific name for them. They are usually long and complex and end with a death, either murder or suicide. Is there an anthology of these riddle/mystery stories out there? Anybody know where I can get one?

Am I stuck asking "yes" and "no" questions for the rest of my life? And aren't you curious about why the guy killed himself after eating the seagull sandwich? Yes. No. Irrelevant.