Peaky Blinders: The Real Gangs and Gangsters: The real story of Britain's most notorious mid-20th century gangs

by Carl Chinn

288 pages, Paperback

Published January 6, 2026

Reviews

[Tõnu Vahtra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Saw this book in airport bookshops TOP10 in my last trip to UK and picked it up to find out more about the Peaky Blinders Netflix series.
There is no historical proof of Peaky Blinders playing any significant role in organized crime, especially on the epic global level described in the book. Most of them were young men from extremely poor Birmingham industrial neigbourhoods for whom the Peaky Blinder role model possessed the only possibility to extend beyond their extremely limited means in life, this mostly manifested in petty crimes and fighting other gangs and protesting against the extremely limited police forces. The only Peaky Blinder who could be called an organized criminal at some degree was Billy Kimber who wasn't even a Peaky Blinder in the movie and his "crimes" maxed out at fixing some horse races. Extreme violence was part of everyday life in Birmingham during last and first decade of 19th and 20th century respectively, it has been heavily romanticised in the Netflix series. In overall the book is a bit like reading a historic chronicle, not an action/adventure book of a grand narrative/story.

[Alan Proudfoot · Rating 1 out of 5]

As an avid reader, this book just doesn’t work for me! 62 pages in and I’ve simply had to stop! I wasn’t enjoying reading what is, essentially in my opinion, a historical text, that pulls in potential readers (like myself) with the hook of “Peaky Blinders”.

The author clearly has great skill in research, and perhaps mainstream book shops popping this in their ‘holiday reads’ section are more at fault.

If you are expecting Shelby stories, factual or fictional, from the get go, then perhaps this is not the book for you or I!

☹️📖🤓

[James Tidd]

In this fourth instalment of Carl Chinn's Peaky Blinders series, this time he looks at the real gangs and gangsters of late Victorian and Edwardian Birmingham.

Chinn exposes the real people whose feuds, murders and maiming, baiting of the police, bullying of the decent poor, gendered violence, blackmailing, and roles in the political riots and racist attacks made Birmingham infamous as the city of the Peaky Blinders.