Can anyone tell me what is the apparently ongoing fascination with the life and lies of Lillian Hellman?

Another tome devoted to this debauched hag, “Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels” by Deborah Martinson, was recently published, as if there were anything new to say.

What do we know of this person so beloved by the Hollywood and (evidently) the publishing hierarchy? She was a promiscuous drunk who had the great good fortune to get involved in 1930 with a very talented writer, Dashiell Hammett, which helped to change both of their careers. Hammett, once a prolific writer of detective stories, essentially stopped writing anything of significance in 1934, mainly providing the prose for a comic strip, “Secret Agent X-9,” and a fair-to-middling radio program, “The Thin Man.”

Hellman, meanwhile, produced nothing until “The Little Foxes” in 1934, which was followed by “Watch on the Rhine” in 1939.When it was filmed, the co-scriptwriters were Hellman and, at last getting recognition after guiding her through numerous versions of the play’s scripts, Hammett.

The major literary achievements of her later years, “Pentimento” – the 1973 equivalent of James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” – purported to be autobiographical but ultimately proved the accuracy of the famous remark made by Mary McCarthy a few years later when she said of Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘a’ and ‘the.'” The “memoir” was largely about her deep friendship with a woman who, it turned out, she had never even met.

Although extremely wealthy by virtue of her own royalties and those of Hammett, most of which she managed to keep from his widow and two daughters, she decided to become a model in spite of a face that served as the inspiration for the ghouls in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion fright ride. A devoted communist, she was a faithful believer in the virtues of Stalin’s Soviet Union, rapturously exclaiming of the glorious society that “everyone is equally poor.” Idolatry of America’s Cold War enemy with its doomed system did not prevent her from becom ing the spokesmodel for Blackglama mink coats.

This is the paragon who got a standing ovation at the Academy Awards ceremony a few years before her unlamented death because she had refused to name the names of her fellow communists at the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I once had the great joy of speaking with Hellman, or rather of listening to her scream into a telephone for more than 10 minutes. It seems I’d written a biographical essay of Hammett in which I’d referred to her as his mistress, to which she took exception. I finally interrupted to ask if it was the word that upset her, or the relationship. She only answered that if I let that description be published, she would sue me. I wasn’t smart enough to know that she spent the last couple of decades of her life suing everybody who didn’t kiss her, ah, feet, so I ran it anyway. Luckily, she never sued, and I dodged the bullet. She was probably too busy getting her makeup done for the next shoot. Ouch. Low blow. That was almost as nasty as she was.

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Josephine Tey, author of one of the greatest of all pure detective novels, “The Daughter of Time,” must have been a very wise woman. In “The Franchise Affair,” she has one of her characters provide a life lesson. “Horse sense,” she says, “is the instinct that prevents horses from betting on men.”

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The biggest and most important annual honor in the mystery writing world is, of course, the Edgar Allan Poe Award presented by the Mystery Writers of America. I’ll keep you informed of the winners as soon as possible after they are announced at the awards banquet in April, but in the meantime I think it’s appropriate to mention that the MWA has already named this year’s grand master, given in recognition of lifetime achievement.

Following in the footsteps of such previously honored giants of the genre as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Robert B. Parker, Mickey Spillane, and Eric Ambler, the distinction this year goes to Stuart Kaminsky.

Although he has written 50 novels and numerous short stories, biographies, textbooks, screenplays, and television scripts, Mr. Kaminsky somehow has never quite become a household name, though he is both famous and much loved within the mystery community.

A former president of MWA, he has been nominated for six Edgars, winning in 1989 with “A Cold Red Sunrise,” part of his series about Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, a Russian cop trapped in the oppressive bureaucracy of the Moscow police department.This splendid series is not about East-West politics or diplomatic espionage, merely the dogged toil of an honest policeman trying to maintain justice in a corrupt venue that rarely wants it. Of the 14 Inspector Rostnikov novels, three were nominated for Edgars.

Equally popular is Mr. Kaminsky’s series about the golden age of Hollywood featuring Toby Peters, the unprepossessing private eye who shares an office with a dentist, Sheldon Minck. Various adventures feature well-drawn portraits of such clients and other characters as Gary Cooper, Basil Rathbone, John Wayne, Howard Hughes, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Cary Grant, W.C. Fields, and the munchkins from “The Wizard of Oz.”

The richly deserving author also writes books about Abraham Lieberman of the Chicago Police Department, Lew Fonseca,a Sarasota hero who “does things for people,” and stand-alone thrillers; he was also a screenplay writer for one of the most highly praised gangster films ever made, Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” which starred Robert De Niro, James Woods, Joe Pesci, Tuesday Weld, Elizabeth McGovern, and Treat Williams.

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For readers of this column and me, too, I guess you’d have to say John Mortimer, the avuncular creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, was right when he wrote, “A person who is tired of crime is tired of life.”

Mr. Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan and the series editor of the annual “Best American Mystery Stories.” He can be reached at ottopenzler@mysteriousbookshop.com.