The Wrong Man: This story feels like breaking news ... in novel form

The Wrong Man is the fifth in Tim Ayliffe’s John Bailey series, featuring the battle-worn journalist and a chessboard of new and returning characters. His focus: domestic extremism in the form of organised violence against women.

Media executive Tim Ayliffe is making waves as one of Australia's most exciting new thriller writers. Picture: AAP

According to Tim Ayliffe, everything in his books either “has happened, will happen … or could happen”.

“I really want my stories to be true to the world in which we live today,” he says during an interview ahead of the release of his most recent thriller, The Wrong Man.

“I think with crime fiction you actually can do that in quite a unique way. You can carry the reader along with a really gripping story, and if you do the hard work with being true to the world that we live in, then (readers) are getting a really thorough understanding of an issue at the same time.”

The Wrong Man is the latest fast-paced book by Tim Ayliffe

The novel is the fifth in the John Bailey series, featuring the battle-worn journalist and a chessboard of new and returning characters. His focus, this time, is domestic extremism in the form of organised violence against women.

Readers have long praised the page-turning quality of the Bailey series, and fans will be pleased to know this story reads like breaking news in novel form.

Behind closed doors, groups of “incels” – men who consider themselves involuntarily celibate – promote misogynist hate inside the echo chambers of dark web chat rooms and encrypted messaging apps, before it spreads out into homes and workplaces.

“Violence against women and misogyny have been such a burning issue for a long time, but not addressed as it should be, and not taken seriously enough,” Ayliffe says.

“It’s when things don’t get called out that they exacerbate or you get a culture whereby it becomes a bigger problem. And I think we’re really having a bit of a reckoning at the moment, not just in Australia, but around the world.

“So this time around, I wanted to have a look at another kind of extremist movement.”

In doing so, Ayliffe set out to address a topical issue. But he wanted to do it right.

Authors risk accusations of being gratuitous when writing about violence, a common trap of the crime fiction genre, and Ayliffe wanted to treat the issue responsibly.

If he didn’t take this approach, “I would feel that I wasn’t doing a true reflection of what is actually going on in the world right now,’’ he says.

Tim Ayliffe says he wants to write contemporary books, alive to current issues.

“I think back to the serial killer books and movies of the 1990s … and I didn’t want to write that book.

“I wanted to write something that was much more contemporary, but sensitive and alive to this being a real issue. And I didn’t want to do gratuitous violence or exploitative violence. I wanted to actually write a thriller that was probably more true to the moment.”

Ayliffe charts the ways casual, flippant everyday misogyny can build into a more pointed hate against women and then, at its most extreme, into calculated violence.

He seeks to point out what should be painfully obvious – that violence against women begins and ends with men.

“Misogyny and misogynist violence remains a scourge on our world and needs to be called out, particularly by men,” he writes in the book’s final pages.

In the early stages of “investigating” his latest story, Ayliffe sought out women writers for advice, and drew from his own experiences as a husband, father, and journalist of 25 years.

The end product is a story packed with well-rounded female characters that own the world of Ayliffe’s creation. Detective Holly Sutton leads the charge, second only to the legacy left behind by Sharon Dexter.

Then there is Bailey himself.

“Bailey’s a very real person for me,” Ayliffe says. “He’s an amalgam of many great journalists and former correspondents and there’s part of me in there as well.

“When I sit down and write Bailey, in some ways, and with some of the other characters in the book too, it’s like catching up with old friends.”

Sydney also returns as the setting of the series – horrible traffic and road works included.

“I’ve tried to make Sydney a character … I wanted to do that because I’ve seen how Michael Connelly’s done that for Los Angeles, for instance, and Sydney’s my town. I love and hate the place,” he says.

“I find Sydney can be a place of great contradictions because there’s incredible wealth here, we have so much beauty around the harbour particularly, but there is a bit of a grimy underbelly to this place as well.

“So if you’re going to have a real world plot to the books, you need a real world setting too and I didn’t want to be writing Sydney as any kind of caricature or postcard place, I wanted to write it warts at all.”

Readers who sense a “big-screen” feel to Ayliffe’s stories are also in luck. The John Bailey books are currently in development for a TV series with production company CJZ. Award-winning Aussie screenwriter Blake Ayshford is on board and Ayliffe is heavily involved in the writers’ room.

“So watch this space,” he says.

The Wrong Man (Simon & Schuster) is out now. Elizabeth Pike is a journalist based in Sydney.