In the world of Raymond Chandler’s gritty whodunits, a tough but honorable private eye wanders a landscape of human depravity. The detective solves murders and exposes deceit and corruption.

Nearly 60 years after his death, Chandler’s latest story, only recently uncovered and published for the first time this month, continues a crusade against social injustices. But the evil in this short story is very different: the health care system in the United States.

Chandler, whose novels include “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” wrote it toward the end of his life, between 1956 and 1958. (He died at 70 in 1959.) But the tale, “It’s All Right — He Only Died,” could pass as modern fiction, offering sharp criticism about a health care system chasing higher profits and patients who cannot afford treatment.

“It’s like Chandler is looking at the future and seeing how the health care crisis would get even worse,” said Andrew F. Gulli, the managing editor of Strand Magazine, a literary quarterly that published the story. “But what struck me about this was that it was something different and unlike anything he had ever written.”