Between the Lines

— SCARE TACTIC Comedy legend Carl Reiner, who created The Dick Van Dyke Show (and whose career stretches from Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows to a role in last year’s Ocean’s Eleven), is branching out into children’s literature. The father of Rob Reiner has just signed with Little, Brown for his first kids’ book, Tell Me a Scary Story…But Not TOO Scary! ”I had been talking to one of my grandchildren, Rob’s middle child, Nicky, and he said, ‘Tell me a scary story, but not too scary,’ and that stuck in my head,” Grandpa Reiner recalls. ”I’ve always told the kids stories. So I thought, Why not make one up and put it down in a book?” Tell Me, with illustrations by James Bennett, will be out by next Halloween.

— KLUM AGAIN? Heidi Klum — cover girl, swimsuit model…author? Yessiree, the German-born brunette has just reached an agreement with Crown Publishers for Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge, a book with a lot of pictures that will cover such topics as bringing out your inner sexiness, while also dishing a little on her sister supermodels. ”She has major crossover appeal,” says Crown executive editor Kristin Kiser. ”Women like her chutzpah and sense of humor. And men will want to look at the pictures.”

— GRANDMA’S DISH Anyone looking for the back story to Eminem’s bitter, wrenching lyrics might find it in the memoir that his maternal grandmother, Betty Kresin, has just sent out to publishers. The Ties That Bind tells the story not only of Kresin’s own hardscrabble upbringing, but also of Eminem’s friendship with his uncle Ronnie, Kresin’s son from a later marriage who died in an apparent suicide in 1991 — and whose death has haunted the rapper’s rhymes. ”She has a story to tell on her own, but she also happens to be Eminem’s grandmother, so it sheds incredible light on his music,” says Kresin’s agent Barbara J. Zitwer. ”It’s like Angela’s Ashes, the lives these people led.”