Best known for the Hornblower series of sea stories, CS Forester (1899-1966) also wrote thrillers set in suburban London. The Pursued (1935) is a story of revenge rather than detection, in which the identity of the murderer is clear from the start. Housewife Marjorie returns home to a smell of gas and the sight of her babysitter – her younger sister Dot – with her head in the oven, dead. But Marjorie's husband, Ted, is calm – suspiciously so. And he happens to be a womanising brute who sells gas appliances for a living.

When it emerges that Dot was pregnant, her mother plots to punish Ted by pushing Marjorie into the arms of his handsome young assistant at work – and wait for lust and jealousy to do the rest. Daring for the time – the plot turns on Marjorie's menstrual cycle – The Pursued offers a masterclass in how to write about sex and desire without the latitude that writers would now take for granted. The storyline is sensational but the treatment is serious and the novel conveys the misery of an abusive marriage without plumbing its depths.

Throughout, there's a sense of a novelist in total control of his material; the narrative is seeded with incidental detail that becomes crucial when you least expect it. Forester's shifting point of view feels psychologically persuasive, whether it's focused on Marjorie's four-year-old son, playing with sandcastles at the seaside, or on Ted, threatening to beat his daughter if Marjorie won't sleep with him.

It seems incredible that the manuscript was lost for six decades. An endnote by Lawrence Brewer, a Forester enthusiast who purchased it when it turned up at auction in 1999, calls it a "little masterpiece"; he's not wrong.