In November The Strand Magazine published It’s All Right – He Only Died, a recently discovered story which was among the last things Raymond Chandler, the great crime writer, wrote before his death in 1959. The story, written between July 1956 and spring 1958, was found in the author’s archives at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.
The short, about a homeless man, is in part a savage attack on America’s private medical system. In a note also published in The Strand accompanying the story, Chandler observed that a doctor who does not treat a sick person because of financial issues ‘disgrace(s) himself as a person, as a healer, as a saviour of life, as a man required by his profession never to turn aside from anyone his long-acquired skill might help or save.’