Certain kinds of dishonesty give off a near-irresistible air of glamour, which is why the career of Han van Meegeren continues to exert a strange fascination on people who ought to know better. Fortunately, Jonathan Lopez’s “The Man Who Made Vermeer: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren” (Harcourt, 340 pp., $26) will disabuse all who read it of the notion that van Meegeren’s career was in any way glamorous. Fascinating, yes-but not in the way you might suppose.

Even if van Meegeren’s name rings only the faintest of bells, the subtitle of Lopez’s book will likely prompt you to remember that he was the Dutch art forger whose ersatz Vermeers were so plausible that they fooled Hermann Goering, who “bought” one for his celebrated collection of looted art, a purchase that briefly landed the artist in jail after the war. In order to prove to prosecutors that he was indeed capable of having painted “Christ and the Adulteress,” van Meegeren painted yet another fake Vermeer, and was duly set free.

All this is true enough, but there is a good deal more to van Meegeren’s unsavory story, starting with the fact that he was an ardent Nazi sympathizer whose liking for Adolf Hitler predated his palming “Christ and the Adulteress” off on Goering. And while his forgeries fooled a great many highly knowledgeable people and institutions-including the curators of the National Gallery of Art, which long took for granted the legitimacy of the two van Meegeren “Vermeers” left to the museum by Andrew Mellon-their phoniness is now obvious to all who see them.

How, then, did van Meegeren get away with it? As Lopez explains, he had the perversely ingenious idea of tailoring his fakes to suit the specific cultural interests of the dupes to whom he sold them. Because he was operating at a time when Vermeer’s work was not nearly so well known as it is today, this made it possible for him to confect out of thin air a whole series of late Vermeers whose subject matter was explicitly religious, as well as a portrait reproduced in “The Man Who Made Vermeers” that was far from spiritual:

A variation on “The Girl with the Red Hat,” it is sometimes known today as “The Greta Garbo Vermeer,” as the face of the sitter bears a striking resemblance to movie posters for “Anna Christie” and “Wild Orchids”-an interesting and apparently effective subliminal appeal to the eyes of the 1930s, since the anachronism blended in completely unnoticed with the prevailing tastes of the day. The great connoisseur Max Friedländer…wholeheartedly accepted this picture as a Vermeer when it was brought in for attribution, reportedly calling it “splendid.”

Therein lies the enduring appeal of van Meegeren: anyone with a touch of larceny in his heart cannot but thrill to hear of such feats of expert-foxing legerdemain. It is thus salutary to read in “The Man Who Made Vermeers” that he was not a charming rogue but a twisted, frustrated man whose technique far outstripped his creativity-and that many of the canvases he painted under his own name made explicit use of the same pro-Nazi symbolic imagery that can also be found in more subtle form in his later “Vermeers.”

The only good thing about van Meegeren, as Lopez explains, is that his forgeries have had the perverse effect of teaching a new generation of scholars to know better:

Older books on Vermeer…now make for perplexing-indeed, almost comical-reading because they contain so many weird and unfamiliar pictures. In contrast, pick up the catalogue of the 1996 Vermeer show at the National Gallery of Art, and you’ll find that the chaos has been swept away. With no more than thirty-six paintings now firmly attributed to the master, there are certainly fewer Vermeers, but Vermeer is much the better for it.

So, too, will anyone inclined to romanticize Han van Meegeren’s life and work be much the better for reading “The Man Who Made Vermeers.”