Mackenzie Davis' bookshelf of crime stories

Mackenzie Davis' acting career has largely been based on roles slightly outside the conventional female star repertoire: as a programming prodigy in AMC's sleeper hit “Halt and Catch Fire”; as Cyborg in Blade Runner 2049 and Terminator: Dark Fate; as a lesbian who is close to her family in “Happiest Season”; and as a doomsday actress in “Station Eleven,” the HBO adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s pandemic novel. This fall, she stars with James McAvoy in the psychological horror film Speak No Evil, playing the unfortunate houseguest of a dysfunctional couple. Davis, a Canadian, is an avid reader whose tastes vary widely – “there's no connection between the things I read other than they're on my bedside table,” she said recently – although this is the case with many of her favorite books is about crime. She talked to us about some of them; Your comments have been edited and shortened.

The corpse had a familiar face

by Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan was a beat reporter for Miami Heraldand this book, published in the late 1980s, is a kind of journalistic memoir about her eighteen-year career reporting on crime there. You will get a vivid picture of the city as a multicultural place that is reformulating its identity. You also find out their opinions about husbands (don't like them), cats (love them) and the like.

I found out about it because I was at Penn Station about to take a fourteen-hour train to Texas, and I bought one New Yorker True crime reader, which included Calvin Trillin's article about her. It reminds me of a woman who feels both very modern and cool and out of date at the same time – I just read everything she said in the piece with a mid-Atlantic accent. I tried for years to get the rights to this book because I just wanted to tell her story, but I couldn't. That's why I'm happy to talk about how much I love her.

The journalist and the murderer

by Janet Malcolm

This is about the relationship between a journalist and his subject, a man on trial for the murder of his wife and two children. The journalist was accepted into the legal team and given legal privilege to cover the trial – he was very close to the legal team and, when the man was convicted, exchanged letters with him while he was in prison, without revealing anything that he was actually writing a book wrote that was pretty damning. The murderer later sued the journalist for misleading people.

Malcolm uses the trial to ask really interesting questions about the manipulation and exploitation of the relationship between journalists and their subjects. Her writing is propulsive – much like In the Freud Archives, she turns a topic that seems niche into a real thriller. But what I really like about her is that she has a personality. She's biased and you know what she thinks about people and I love hearing what she thinks.

The Hangman's Song

by Norman Mailer

I didn't really know anything about Norman Mailer before reading this book, except that the man I saw in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall” seemed very unpleasant. I read this last summer when I was visiting my parents in the remote area where they live and my dad was reading it. It's an incredible book based on the life of a man named Gary Gilmore, an ex-con who tried to get his life together but then robbed and murdered two men and was sent to death row. At this point, the United States had effectively suspended the death penalty, but Gilmore wanted to be executed, and in the end he became the first person to be executed in over a decade.

To anyone who has seen Town Bloody Hall, Mailer doesn't seem like a man of overly empathy or understanding, but I feel like he's really gentle here in a way. He has a lot of empathy for the characters I describe as outsiders – the kind of people in Denis Johnson's stories who are often relegated to the margins of society and forgotten. I really didn't think Mailer would be someone I would spend a thousand pages with, but I loved this book so much.

Too many customers

by Rex Stout

This is a crime novel by Nero Wolfe – Rex Stout wrote about seventy of them. They're basically pulpy potboiler mysteries, and they're a lot of fun. They all follow the corpulent detective Nero, who lives in a townhouse with his butler Fritz. Each book follows the same formula: He is presented with a crime; Archie, the narrator, investigates and then brings his discoveries to Nero, who drinks an ice-cold glass of beer – perfectly poured by Fritz – finds out, and then has an incredible meal. (I actually have the Nero Wolfe cookbook, but unfortunately no one I know reads the books or wants to eat from them.)

Bonus selection: “Lapvona,” from Ottessa Moshfegh

This one isn't part of the theme, but I just love it – it's the first book I recommend to everyone. To be honest, “Eileen” wasn’t for me. I loved My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But in my opinion this is the best of these three books. It's an absolutely crazy medieval allegory fable – it has elements of The Princess Bride but is much darker. It's hard to describe the plot, but it's about a farm boy who lives in a town with a kind of castle on a hill and finds his inheritance. It's so crazy, so joyfully pathetic and sick and rich and unctuous. There are images and certain passages that really stick with you. She feels like my soulmate when I read this book.