Can an air-intake fan stop smoke wafting through a brick common wall?

It shouldn’t happen but it does. The house next door to a friend’s semi-detached house burned. It wasn’t a big fire but smoke wafted through the common brick wall, particularly along the joists. And that turned out to occasion a lot of damage in our friend’s house.

These stone-houses are over 130 years old. And, short of lifting the floors along the common brick wall, which would in turn require major work, there does not seem anything that can be done to make the common brick wall airtight.

We live in the same kind of semi-detached a few houses away and I started wondering if having an intake fan that would create a slight over-pressure in the house might not be enough to prevent the smoke from wafting across the common wall.

The questions then would be:

1. What kind of fan? E.g. air-flow versus high-pressure?
2. How to size the fan? E.g. in relation to the volume of the house or in relation to the area of the common wall?
3. Where to locate the fan? (Assuming all outside doors and all windows are closed and all inside doors are open.) Most convenient in our case would be the basement. But another plus would be to confine the unavoidable air flow and just let the pressure build up in the rest of the house.