[1] Many of his books feature stock characters, including General Charles Kirk of British Intelligence and his friends, the scientist Sir Marcus Levin and his Russian wife Tania.
[3] His horror novels are often structured as thrillers, with detective story plots involving international espionage, but often leading to either a supernatural or science fictional resolution.
[4] The Flame and the Wind (1967), by contrast, is an unusual historical novel set in Roman times, in which a nephew of Pontius Pilate tries to discover the facts about the crucifixion of Jesus.
[7] His use of science fiction is generally borderline, though not in Children of the Night, which features – in classic sci-fi fashion – an underground lost race, this time with telepathic powers.
[8] Adrian Schober has argued Blackburn was likely interested in racial intolerance because of his own family history in colonial Mauritius, which had seen intermarriage between whites and native women over previous generations.
[11] John Welcome in the Irish Times praised Blackburn's Blow The House Down as a "brilliant evocation of present-day stresses...more than a thriller, a contemporary novel and good one".