Scholarly story about the heartless scoundrel (8)
I believe the answer is:
literate
'scholarly' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'story about the heartless scoundrel' is the wordplay.
'story' becomes 'lie' (I've seen this before).
'about' is an insertion indicator.
'heartless' means to remove the middle letters.
'scoundrel' becomes 'rat' (I've seen this in other clues).
'the' with its centre removed is 'te'.
'te'+'rat'='terat'
'lie' enclosing 'terat' is 'LITERATE'.
(Other definitions for literate that I've seen before include "Learned" , "Relate it, being well read" , "Erudite" , "well expressed" , "version of 'speed of light'?" .)