Mackenzie Davis’s Bookshelf of Crime Stories

Mackenzie Davis’s acting career has been built largely from roles that sit slightly outside the conventional female-star repertoire: as a programming prodigy in AMC’s sleeper hit “Halt and Catch Fire”; as a cyborg in “Blade Runner 2049” and in “Terminator: Dark Fate”; as a lesbian closeted to her family in “Happiest Season”; and as an end-of-the-world thespian in “Station Eleven,” HBO’s adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel of a pandemic. This fall, she appears with James McAvoy in the psychological-horror movie “Speak No Evil,” where she plays the unlucky house guest of a disturbed couple. Davis, who is Canadian, is an avid reader whose tastes range widely—“there’s no connective tissue between the things that I read, other than that they’re on my bedside table,” she recently said—though many of her favorite books are about crime. She talked to us about some of them; her remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Corpse Had a Familiar Face

by Edna Buchanan

Edna Buchanan was a beat reporter for the Miami Herald, and this book, which came out in the late eighties, is a kind of journalistic memoir about her eighteen-year career covering crime there. You get a vivid picture of the city as a multicultural place that was rearticulating its identity. You also get her opinions about husbands (doesn’t like them), cats (loves them), things like that.

I found out about her because I was at Penn Station, about to take a fourteen-hour train to Texas, and I bought a New Yorker reader about true crime that included Calvin Trillin’s piece about her. He evokes a woman who feels both really modern and cool and also out of time—I just read everything that she said in the piece in a mid-Atlantic accent. I tried for years to get the rights to this book, because I just want to tell her story, but I did not succeed. So I’m happy just to talk about how much I love her.

The Journalist and the Murderer

by Janet Malcolm

This one is about the relationship between a journalist and his subject, a man on trial for murdering his wife and his two children. The journalist was included in the legal team and received attorney-client privilege to cover the trial—he became very close to the legal team, and, when the man was convicted, carried on a correspondence with him while he was in prison, never revealing that he was actually writing a book that was quite damning. The murderer later sued the journalist for misleading him.

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 makes a subject that seems niche into a real thriller. But actually what I really like about her is that she’s a personality. She’s judgmental, and you know what she thinks about people, and I love hearing what she thinks.

The Executioner’s Song

by Norman Mailer

I didn’t really know anything about Norman Mailer before I read this book, except that the man I’d seen 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 was kind of trying to get his life right, but then robbed and murdered two men and was sent to death row. At that point, the U.S. had effectively suspended the death penalty, but Gilmore wanted to be executed, and in the end he became the first person in over a decade to be executed.

For anybody who’s seen “Town Bloody Hall,” Mailer doesn’t come across as a man with excesses of empathy or understanding, but I feel like, here, he is really gentle, in a way. He has a lot of empathy for what I think of as outsider characters—the sorts of people in Denis Johnson stories, who often get relegated to the outskirts of society and forgotten. I really didn’t think Mailer would be somebody I would want to spend a thousand pages with, but I loved this book so much.

Too Many Clients

by Rex Stout

This is a Nero Wolfe detective novel—Rex Stout wrote, like, seventysomething of them. They’re pulpy potboiler mysteries, basically, and they are very fun. All of them follow this corpulent detective, Nero, who lives in a town house with his butler, Fritz. Every book follows the same formula: a crime is presented to him; Archie, the narrator, goes out and investigates, and then brings his discoveries to Nero, who drinks an ice-cold glass of beer—poured perfectly by Fritz—figures it out, and then has an incredible meal. (I actually have the Nero Wolfe cookbook, but unfortunately nobody I know reads the books or wants food from it.)

Bonus pick: “Lapvona,” by Ottessa Moshfegh

This one isn’t part of the theme, but I just love it—it’s the first book that I recommend to anybody. Truthfully, “Eileen” wasn’t for me. I loved “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.” But, in my opinion, this is the best book out of those three. It’s an absolutely bonkers medieval allegory-fable—it has elements of “The Princess Bride,” but is so much darker. It’s hard to describe the plot, but it involves a peasant boy who lives in a town with a sort of castle on a hill finding his heritage. It’s so deranged, so joyfully pathetic and sick and rich and unctuous. There are images and certain passages that really stay with you. She feels like my soulmate when I read this book.