Taiwanese writer Chi Wei-jan (紀蔚然) has won the Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society in Japan for his debut novel Private Eyes (私家偵探), making him the first Taiwanese to win the honor, Ink Publishing Co said on Tuesday.
The Falcon Award is presented annually to honor the best hard-boiled mystery novel published in Japan.
Mystery writer and translator Jiro Kimura, who founded the society’s Japanese chapter, announced the news on Twitter.
Photo: CNA
The Maltese Falcon Society was founded in San Francisco in 1981 based on the 1930 detective novel The Maltese Falcon by US writer Dashiell Hammett.
The organization is no longer active in the US, but the Japanese chapter has been active since 1982.
The winners of the award are masters of contemporary mystery novels, such as US crime writer Lawrence Block, who has received the award twice for When the Sacred Ginmill Closes and A Ticket to the Boneyard, the publisher said.
US mystery authors Michel Connelly, Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton and Don Winslow have won Falcon Awards from the Japanese chapter.
Private Eyes tells the story of a former professor who becomes a private detective. It became a literary sensation when it came out in 2011, winning almost every major literary award in Taiwan that year, including the China Times Open Book Award and Asia Weekly Top 10 Chinese Novel of the Year.
It also won the 2012 Taipei Book Fair Award for Fiction and was later translated into French, Japanese, Italian, Turkish and Korean.
Chi’s contemporary detective story last month also won the Honkaku Mystery Award, which honors best works of mystery fiction published over the previous year in Japan.
Last year, Chi published a sequel, titled DV8: Private Eyes 2 (DV8：私家偵探2)
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