Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma-Kola: A Manual of Etiquette for Ladies Crossing Canada by Train

Henry G. MacLeod teaches sociology at both Trent University and the
University of Waterloo.

Anyone who has ever taken a transcontinental train trip across Canada or
watched numerous films like White Christmas featuring the stars in the
club car will enjoy this new edition of Sitting in the Club Car Drinking
Rum and Karma-Kola. Travelling by train can at times be slow and boring
and is not for claustrophobics, but there is also a romantic quality and
an element of mystery associated with train trips. Jiles’s brief story
invokes that mood through her use of poetic imagery. The reader can
easily picture and be amused by the group of Americans absorbed in the
board game Clue as the train races through the Canadian Rockies.

The story is a modern fable about love and escape from everyday life as
well as about the rules of etiquette for ladies crossing Canada by
train. It offers a spoof of detective fiction through a series of very
short vignettes, sprinkled with allusions to classic detective movies of
the 1940s with images of Myrna Loy, Katharine Hepburn, and Lauren
Bacall. The story revolves around the unnamed heroine on the run and the
handsome detective in pursuit. The book is easy to read, funny, and
suspenseful.

Jiles moved to Canada in 1969 to work for CBC Radio. She won the 1984
Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection Celestial
Navigation.