Other variants exist, such as in forestry, for moving logs, and a type with a long shaft, used by city workers to remove manhole covers.

Before the age of containerization, freight was moved on and off ships with extensive manual labor, and the longshoreman's hook was the basic tool of the dockworker.

[3] A longshoreman's hook looks somewhat intimidating, and as it was also associated with strong, tough dockworkers, it became a commonly used weapon in crime fiction, similar to the ice pick.

For example, in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled Shopping for Death, a character is murdered (off-screen) using a longshoreman's hook.

It was sometimes used as a weapon and means of intimidation in real life as well; the book Joey the Hit Man: The Autobiography of a Mafia Killer [4] states "One guy who used to work on the docks was called Charlie the Hook.

They are also the primary weapon of Spider Splicers in the BioShock series, so named due to their use of the hooks to crawl on ceilings and attack unexpectedly.