Wikipedia
Dead Man's Handle
Dead Man's Handle is the title of a 1985 action-adventure/spy novel written by Peter O'Donnell. It was the eleventh and final full-length novel chronicling the adventures of O'Donnell's comic strip creation, Modesty Blaise. Although O'Donnell continued to write the comic strip, he did not write any further Modesty Blaise literature until the 1996 volume, Cobra Trap, which consisted of short stories.
Usage examples of "dead man's handle".
Someone's got to stop him yelling a detonation command, tripping the dead man's handle, or otherwise making the weasel go pop.