1. The Elevator
A person lives on the fourteenth floor of an apartment block. On a normal working morning s/he goes to the elevator on the fourteenth floor, takes it to the ground floor and leaves the building. In the evening, s/he returns, enters the elevator on the ground floor, takes it as far as the eighth floor and walks the rest of the way. (Variant: On rainy days s/he takes the elevator all the way to the fourteenth floor in the evening.)
2. John & Mary
John is dead on the floor; Mary is asleep on the couch.
3. The Hanged Person
A person hangs by the neck from a beam twenty feet from the floor of a building. The rope is five feet long. Aside from the person, beam and rope the building is empty, and its walls are perfectly smooth.
4. The Glass of Water
A person goes into a bar and asks for a glass of water. The bartender produces a gun.
5. Escape from the Smooth Building
A person is imprisoned in a building with perfectly smooth walls, forty feet high, with a skylight. The person escapes through the skylight.
6. One Lives, One Dies
Two people enter a bar and order drinks. One finishes the drink quickly, leaves and suffers no consequences. The other nurses the drink and dies within a couple of hours.
7. The Drowned Person
A body is washed up on the shore.
8. The Sawdust If he'd seen the sawdust, he wouldn't be dead.
9. The Parcel
A person receives a parcel in the mail, opens it, wraps it up again and sends it to another person. The second person opens it, then throws it away.
10. Albatross
A person enters a restaurant and orders albatross. When it arrives s/he takes a bite, then leaves.
11. Sudden Tears
A person has just left the apartment building on the way to work. All of a sudden the person breaks down in tears.
12. Lucky Murderer
Alice has committed a murder, and been convicted. However, she can't be punished.
13. The Cabin by the Lake
A cabin by the lake contains three bodies.
14. Final Cadence
The music stopped; a man died.
15. Dangerous Dinner Date
Two men have dinner together and walk to the theatre to meet their wives who have been to a movie. When the wives come out, one man shoots the other and then dies himself.
16. The Man in the Mask
A man is running home. He sees a man in a mask running towards him, so he turns around and runs back where he came from.
17. Magic Car
There's a man in a car dead from a gunshot wound. All the windows are rolled up, the doors are locked, and there are no bullet-holes anywhere (except in the man). There is no gun in the car. How did it happen?
18. Night Vision
A man is walking down the road dressed entirely in black. There are no lights on anywhere and no moon. A car with no lights on comes down the road and manages to avoid the man. How?
19. Fifty Three
A man lies dead surrounded by 53 objects.
20. No Accident
A man reads in the paper that Mr. X and his wife were skiing in the Alps, and that Mrs. X had an accident, fell off the mountain and was killed. The man puts down the paper and says to himself, "That was no accident; Mr. X killed his wife." How did he know?
21. The Square
A man lies dead on the ground with a square on his back.
22. Insomnia
John is lying in bed at 2 a.m., unable to sleep. Finally he gets up, goes over to the phone, dials, says "Hello, Bill," and hangs up immediately. He then returns to bed and falls asleep without any problem.
Explanations:
1. The person is a dwarf who can reach only as far as the eighth floor button. (Variant: On rainy days s/he uses her/his umbrella to reach the fourteenth floor button.)
2. John is a goldfish, Mary a cat. Mary has accidentally knocked over the goldfish bowl, causing John's death from asphyxiation.
3. The person has committed suicide by making a pile of ice, climbing it to attach the rope to the beam, and waiting for the ice to melt. (The building can be located in a desert; a large truck can be outside the building.)
4. The person has hiccups. Realising this, the bartender is intending to scare her/him, and thus effect a cure.
5. The floor of the building is earth. The person digs into the earth and builds a mound up which s/he climbs to the skylight.
6. The drinks contained poisoned ice-cubes (placed there by the bartender?). Only the drinker who lets the ice-cube melt dies.
7. The body is that of a blind person who was in the habit of guiding her/himself to church by the sound of its bell. The way to the church leads along a cliff-top. One day the bell is not ringing, but misled by the sound of a similar bell on a ship at sea, the person walks off the cliff.
8. "He" was the shortest man in the world, in the habit of checking this status by measuring himself with a wooden stick of the same length as his height. His rival, the second shortest, has engineered a heart attack by shortening the stick, thus leading the deceased to believe that he had grown, and that his livelihood was in jeopardy. (He makes his living from his lack of height, e.g. in a circus.)
9. The parcel contains a human leg. The two people mentioned were shipwrecked with a third, and all three made a pact that each would donate a leg to prevent them from starving. They were rescued before the third leg had to be removed, but the third person is committed by the pact. This person, then, buys a severed leg from a mortician friend, and mails it to the others in the hope that this will satisfy them. It does.
10. This person has been shipwrecked on an island inhabited by what s/he takes to be cannibals. The natives feed her/him albatross, but s/he has doubts about their description of the food as albatross. Instead s/he fears that it might be the bodies of her/his companions. The taste of albatross in the restaurant back home allays these fears.
11. The person's spouse has just died. The spouse was on a life- support system in their apartment, and this has just ceased to function on account of a power cut. The person outside knows this through seeing all the lights in the building go out at once.
12. Alice is a Siamese twin. Her twin is totally innocent.
13. The cabin is the cabin of an aircraft which has crashed next to the lake. The bodies are those of its occupants, killed by the impact.
14. A blind or blind-folded tightrope walker is killed by a bandleader who covets his wife. Normally the tightrope walker makes a leap from the rope to a platform when the band stops playing (a signal); this time the bandleader stops the music too early, causing the tightrope walker to leap to his death.
15. The two men disagree on whether one would do something under hypnosis which one would not do otherwise. The lawyer says "No" and the psychiatrist says "Yes." They make a wager. The psychiatrist hypnotises the lawyer and instructs him to kill his (the psychiatrist's) wife when she comes out of the movie. As the women come out, the psychiatrist suffers a heart attack which he knows will soon prevent him intervening, so he shoots the lawyer to save his wife's life.
16. It's a baseball game.
17. The car is a convertible.
18. It's daylight.
19. He was shot after having been caught cheating at cards - with an extra Ace. In certain cultural contexts "bicycles" can be substituted for "objects," but this flops if no one is familiar with the brand name.
20. The man reading the paper is a travel agent. He sold Mr. X tickets for his trip: 1 round trip and 1 one-way.
21. The square is a parachute which has failed to open.
22. John was in a motel, next to a room containing a loud snorer. He woke the snorer up by calling his room, thus allowing himself to sleep.