A long-forgotten novel that shows some potential

A note on the long-forgotten novel that I've just started reading, Ernest Ryamond's We, the Accused (1935), recommended to me by thoughtful reader w/ similarly eccentric tastes, DC: This British novel is billed (on the Penguin ed. cover) as a murder mystery (soon be be a "motion picture"!), but fromthe first 50 pp or so of reading it does not seem or feel at all like a conventional crime novel. ER spends a lot of time in the first chapters on character development and back story and on establishing a sense of place (a North London working-class neighborhood), making the novel feel more like a work of social realism, with obvious echoes of Dickens and perhaps of Zola as well? The protagonist is a 50ish man recently married, for the first time, to a widow a few years his senior and somewhat wealthy, at least compared w/ anything he's known. The man is a teacher in a third-rate private school, disappointed in his life, his failed aspirations to be a scholar or writer, and in particular unhappy in his marriage, as he sees his wife as petty, ill, and demanding. As ER introduces us to the protagonist's place of work, we meet a few other English eccentrics - not as extreme as Dickens characters of course but quirky, odd, and petulant - I see a touch of Graham Greene here as well. 'm impressed by the start of this novel, and if ER can manage to maintain the tensions of a good plot alongside his depiction of character and setting this will be a really good book that for some reason has sunk into obscurity (perhaps it was his only good book?).