DREDA Say Mitchell has been many things in her life. Sporting youth with a promising future in athletics, head teacher, education consultant and advisor, a broadcaster and a journalist – “In other words a real busybody”, as she says on her website.

What she never set out to be, however, was a crime writer. So you didn’t choose a life of crime, Dreda?

“Crime chose me,” she says, spoken almost like a hardened recidivist. Apart, that is, from the chuckle that cocoons her words. Dreda chuckles a lot, laughs too. She is warm and lively, and punctuates her fast-flowing sentences with exclamations of “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” before bowling into the next subject. Her enthusiasm almost vibrates the phone.

Dreda’s newish life of crime started a long while after her older athletic life. As a schoolgirl in Tower Hamlets in East London, where she was born in 1965 to Grenadian parents, she ran when young and then took up the shot-put, at which she excelled. A promising future in athletics beckoned, but she turned and walked away.

“I knew there was this thing with black kids, especially at secondary school, that they were pushed towards sport,” she says. “I was already interested in history and knew I wanted to go to university and do academic things.”

So she turned in another direction, training to be a teacher, and ending up as a head teacher of a primary school in the East End, a job she loved.

As a now-established writer of crime novels, she still has a foot in education, working as a consultant who specialises in literacy programmes for underachieving black boys.

Although her writing has definitely taken off, she likes to keep in touch with her original day job. “People see that you have four or five books out and think that you must be making lots of money, but it isn’t always like that. Not many writers can live off just writing.”

Dreda’s novels are set in and around the East London she knows. Her racy page-turners have earned praise from the grand dame of Essex crime, Martina Cole, whose endorsement is splashed on her covers – “A great read written by a great girl.”

She had made her debut with Running Hot, published in 2004 and featuring Elijah ‘Schoolboy’ Campbell, who has a week to escape Hackney and London’s underworld. She wanted to write about marginalised people, drug dealing and the bonds of society, serious concerns dressed up in fiction. Then she discovered she had written a crime book.

“Someone at my publishers said, ‘You know that this is a crime novel, a crime chase novel’,” says Dreda. Running Hot was submitted in a Crime Writers’ Association competition – and won the best first novel award.

So that was how crime found Dreda Say Mitchell, now the author of five novels, the latest of which, Hit Girls, has just been published by Hodder with the following tag-line: “Jackie, Anna, Roxy and Ollie. Four women with shady pasts who take the cases people don’t take to the cops. They enter a world of easy sex and even easier violence...”

In her crime novels, Dreda is interested in exploring the bloodied and blurred margins. She dwells on the underworld or on migrant communities. “People with their backs against the wall, people who wouldn’t necessarily be happy about going to the police about anything,” she says.

Dreda is now chairing this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, running from Thursday, July 21 to Sunday, July 24. The festival, one of the highlights of the crime-writing year, has returned to its original home of the Old Swan Hotel.

She is excited about the role. “Thrilled!” she says, in another rush of winning enthusiasm. “Thrilled, amazed – I can’t believe just how enjoyable the experience has been; such a pleasure.”

A few years ago, her publisher tried to get her featured on the Young Blood panel of new writers, but to no avail, although she made it the next year. Now a few blinks later she is curator of the whole festival.

Although this might sound daunting, Dreda has not been left alone. “There’s so much help from everyone,” she says, running through the organisers, the festival panel, the publishers, and the writers who make or pass on recommendations.

As regulars will attest, this is a cheerful event, perhaps in direct proportion to the sometimes gruesome books it promotes. “The nice thing is that when you walk into the bar, you’re not sure who are the writers and who are the readers,” says Dreda. “And that’s good. There’s no hierarchy, with writers sitting behind tables. Everyone is together. And that’s how it should be.”

She is aware that matching the success of previous festivals might a tall order, but hasn’t been put off by the challenge.

“I wanted a rawer edge than in previous festivals,” she says. “The festival has been going for seven years now, and each time it takes on new dimensions and new directions. I’m confident that 2011 is going to be the best yet”.

She has taken her lead from “the grittier and true crime end of the spectrum”, including writers such as Duncan Campbell and Howard Marks alongside novelists such as David Baldacci, Lee Child, Martina Cole, Lisa Garden and Dennis Lehane.

Dreda herself isn’t averse to grit. There is a degree of violence in her novels. So how does she approach this? “I make it up, but I know about violence,” she says. “Violence is always around. And violence can happen at any moment. I grew up in the East End. Boys I knew ended up in prison, and people tell you things.”

Her sixth book will be something different, and will not be confined to London. She wants to create a character she can develop to sustain a series. “But I don’t want to say too much about it at the moment,” she says.

And for once the voluble busybody has nothing to add.

For details on the Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, visit harrogate-festival.org.uk/crime/ email boxoffice@harrogatetheatre.co.uk or telephone 01423 502116.

Julian Cole’s second York-based crime novel, Felicity’s Gate, has just been published in the US by Minotaur Books.