Dr. Deadly's Book Club

Queen Bee: A dominant female who leads and controls a group, often through manipulation and bullying

Imagine, dear reader, that you are a queen bee. (And maybe you are!)

What are your goals? What do you worry about? How do you handle problems? Who do you trust?

Kaira Rouda’s latest novel, We Were Never Friends, had Dr. Deadly thinking about the experience of queen bees, and what fantastic characters they make in crime novels.

The story has four sorority sisters reuniting 25 years after a tragedy, and all their buried sins coming to light. Queen bee behavior fuels the plot. I found myself thinking about bad things people can do when they feel threatened and desperate, like lying and cheating and backstabbing (both the figurative and literal kinds). The pages are filled with all of it in We Were Never Friends.

By the end, my burning question was about the difference – and where we’d draw the line – between self-defense and self-preservation.

Consider a relatively clear example of self-defense. If someone twice my size attacked me with a knife, dear reader, I hope you would allow me to push them off a cliff.

But now consider self-preservation, and how it might look on a spectrum. Remember Les Miserables, and Jean Valjean stealing one loaf of bread to feed his sister and her seven children? Would every one of us sentence him to five years of hard labor?

Go further along the self-preservation spectrum. Imagine Jean Valjean got away with taking the bread, but then his neighbor threatens to tell Inspector Javert. Jean Valjean kills the neighbor, to avoid going to jail. How do you feel about that?

Now imagine Jean Valjean has just enough bread to keep from starving. But his neighbor expects a bread delivery tomorrow. And so Jean Valjean lands his neighbor in the hospital for a week so he can stockpile the bread, because he wants extra bread security.

Hmmm. How much self-preservation can you get behind, dear reader?

This is what makes queen bees excellent characters for crime fiction. When their greater need for control outweighs their empathy, they’ll go far to achieve that self-preservation. The potential for over-the-line behavior is huge. And that behavior can make for some fascinating reading.

I like to think of myself as someone who’d never hurt a fly, and so, when I first started reading, I wasn’t sure I could related to the more Machiavellian characters and their desperate, selfish acts. But then came the late-night moment in my kitchen with a huge, nasty bug who most certainly had a different view of me. I stood there, the book abandoned on the counter and the scrunched-up paper towel in my adrenaline-pumped fist, and realized…maybe I can relate, under the right circumstances.