Maltese Falcon Society Maltese Falcon Society The Maltese Falcon Society is an organization for admirers of Dashiell Hammett, his novel "The Maltese Falcon," and hardboiled mystery books and writers in general. Founded in San Francisco in 1981, the organization is no longer active in the United States; however, a chapter in Japan has been active continuously since 1982. The Japanese branch of the society presents the Falcon Award, Japan's highest honor in the mystery field, to honor the best hardboiled mystery novel published in Japan. The Maltese Falcon Society was founded in San Francisco on May 20, 1981 by literary historian and biographer
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.