Sam Spade Sam Spade Sam Spade is a fictional private detective and the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, "The Maltese Falcon". Spade also appeared in four lesser-known short stories by Hammett. "The Maltese Falcon", first published as a serial in the pulp magazine "Black Mask", is the only full-length novel in which Spade appears. The character, however, is widely cited as a crystallizing figure in the development of hard-boiled private detective fiction—Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, for instance, was strongly influenced by Spade. Spade was a departure from Hammett's nameless and less-than-glamorous detective, The Continental Op. Spade combined several features of previous
Maltese language included in both the "Thesaurus Polyglottus" (1603) and "Propugnaculum Europae" (1606) of Hieronymus Megiser, who had visited Malta in 1588–89; Domenico Magri gave the etymologies of some Maltese words in his "Hierolexicon, sive sacrum dictionarium" (1677). An early manuscript dictionary, "Dizionario Italiano e Maltese", was discovered in the Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome in the 1980s, together with a grammar, the "Regole per la Lingua Maltese", attributed to a French Knight named Thezan. The first systematic lexicon is that of Giovanni Pietro Francesco Agius de Soldanis, who also wrote the first systematic grammar of the language and proposed a standard orthography.