A crime novel that has the aspirations of literary fiction

I'm about half-way through Ernest Raymond's crime novel We, the Accused (1935) - amazingly, half-way through means about 250 pp. into the work, which means that this is no ordinary crime novel but is in many respects a work of literary fiction with the highest of aspirations. In fact, though the novel feels most indebt to the style of Dickens and some early 20th-century British writers in the realism tradition, the work most in Raymond's might could well be Crime and Punishment. He devotes for more of the time to full development of character, in particular the protagonist, Paul Pesset, giving us access to the workings of his consciousness as he contemplates and enacts the "perfect crime." Pesset also (unlike Dostoyevsky) develops a lot of serio-comic minor characters, and spends a lot of time on some topical descriptions of the British landscape and the working-class London neighborhoods - perhaps too much time (do we need such a lengthy rundown, for ex., of each of the members of Pesset's hiking club? - a smart editor could trim this novel by 25 percent w/ no significant loss). Yes, ER is in no rush to get his plot moving; the crime itself doesn't take place till about the midpoint - but still, this is a novel that one should just take at its own declared pace. We know from the outset that Paul will commit a crime - it's not even a spoiler to say here that he kills his wife by mixing arsenic in w/ her medicinal brandy - so the beauty of this novel lies in watching Paul get ever closer to that point, suffering the pangs of guilt and remorse - and of course in the parallel efforts of the London PD to solve the crime; as we read through the first half of the novel we're constantly on the lookout for Paul's mistakes: What does he do wrong or miscalculate that will lead the police to suspect that his wife was murdered? In the second half of the book, these clues and mishaps begin to build and coalesce into a picture - and, as the title tells us, will most likely involve more than one suspect.