Ernest M. Poate

Ernest M. Poate was an American physician and writer of detective fiction who published steadily in Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine during the 1920s and saw several of his serials reissued as books by the firm's Chelsea House imprint, among them The Trouble at Pinelands in 1922, Behind Locked Doors and Pledged to the Dead. His recurring detective, Dr. Thaddeus Bentiron, is a psychiatrist, and medical knowledge runs through his plots, which favor rural settings and a rational explanation for apparently supernatural events. He belongs to the generation of American magazine writers whose work has survived mainly through the cheap editions in which it was first collected.