The Remorseful Day is a crime

Crime fiction

Crime fiction is the literary genre that fictionalizes crimes, their detection, criminals and their motives. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as science fiction or historical fiction, but boundaries can be, and indeed are, blurred...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Colin Dexter

Colin Dexter

Norman Colin Dexter, OBE, is an English crime writer, known for his Inspector Morse novels which were written between 1975 and 1999 and adapted as a television series from 1987 to 2000.-Early life and career:...

, the last novel in the Inspector Morse

Inspector Morse

Inspector Morse is a fictional character in the eponymous series of detective novels by British author Colin Dexter, as well as the 33-episode 1987–2000 television adaptation of the same name, in which the character was portrayed by John Thaw. Morse is a senior CID officer with the Thames Valley...

 series.

Title

The title derives from a line in the poem "XVI - (How clear, how lovely bright)", from More Poems, by A. E. Housman, a favourite poet of Dexter's and Morse:

"Ensanguining the skies

How heavily it dies

Into the west away;

Past touch and sight and sound

Not further to be found,

How hopeless under ground

Falls the remorseful day."

Plot

Morse tries to solve the unsolved murder of Yvonne Harrison as his health deteriorates.

Morse dies of diabetes at the end of the story.

Publication history

• 1999: London: Macmillan ISBN 033376157X, Pub date 15 September 1999, Hardback

Sources, references, external links

• Bishop, David, The Complete Inspector Morse: From the Original Novels to the TV Series London: Reynolds & Hearn (2006) ISBN 1905287135