Quentin Roosevelt

Quentin Roosevelt was the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt and an American military aviator during the First World War. He left Harvard to join the United States Army Air Service, trained as a pursuit pilot and served in France with the 95th Aero Squadron. He was shot down and killed in combat on 14 July 1918.

Roosevelt trained as a pilot after the United States entered the First World War and joined the 95th Aero Squadron in France. He was shot down and killed in aerial combat on 14 July 1918 at the age of twenty. German troops buried him with military honours, and his death became a widely publicised symbol of the personal cost of the war for the family of former president Theodore Roosevelt.

Timothy Ashby’s In Shadowland begins with a fictional mystery built around Quentin Roosevelt’s real wartime death. When his grave in France is opened in 1925 and the body is found not to be his, former investigator Seth Armitage is sent to discover what happened. Roosevelt therefore remains absent but central: his missing remains connect First World War memory, the prestige of the Roosevelt family and the emerging intelligence struggles of post-war Europe.