First person is a strange voice to write in, anyhow. Some people dislike it for anything in the adventure or thriller genre because the very fact that the narrator is telling this story means they survived the events they are describing. I'm not sure this is a real problem. And I don't mean via the counter example of those H.P. Lovecraft characters who scribble their very last moments in their diaries, right up to the final "aaargh!"
No, the really tricky thing in first person is not, to my mind, the presence of the speaker. It is the inferred presence of the listener.
There is a very subtle graduation from the indirect, universal "you" of, "You could drive from London to Greenwich in about thirty minutes on a good day. This was not a good day," to the disconcertingly personal "you" of, "You might not think a 90 pound girl could flip a grown man with a clever bit of Aikido, but..."
In earlier times it was entirely acceptable for the narrative voice to drop a "Dear reader" in here and there. There's the famous Frederik Pohl short story "Day Million," which not only makes the presence of a reader explicit but directly attacks them for their primitive, parochial understanding.
In most modern genre fiction, though, there isn't an implicit listener. In first person, the narrative is meant to feel like the internal monolog of the person having the experiences; not dissimilar to how the simple past tense is used to imply events that are current -- not events which are long concluded.
But it is still very odd that, "I was five foot two and had red hair," is unacceptable, but "I'd been in Dallas for ten years but I'd grown up in Brooklyn" is totally ordinary. And this goes, too, for explaining technical details; whereas the third-person narrative is often forced to chose between raw info-dump or an equally immersion-killing "as you know Bob," the first-person narrator seems more able to get away with going on in extreme detail about things they already obviously know and have no visible reason to be suddenly explaining.
Add to this the comment made by several writers; that first person narrators are allowed to lie to the reader. This is particularly odd if you think about it. In third-person deep penetration (the default for modern genre fiction) the reader is along for the ride in the skull of one person, privy to all of their thoughts and emotions, seeing everything they see (and only what they see.) In first person, you would think that same transparency would be the rule. But it isn't.
Of course first person also has voice. One of the things I like -- but which can also be dangerous -- is that in a third person story internal thoughts are more commonly treated as dialog; "I've got it!" he shouted. I hope I've got it, he thought grimly.
This is used sometimes used in first person, especially when said person is specifically forming a thought. In other times the first person simply "thinks" as part of the stream of narration: "The entire slope was in motion now. This was not good. I swiveled downhill and shoved with all my life on the ski poles. Dammit. The tree line was too far away..."
That said, you can do this (to some extent) in third person as well. Third person deep immersion takes on the color of that third person's voice. This is especially pointed if you are swapping narrators during the story. Each character will see the world differently, focus on different aspects, describe things to their own understanding. You can't take it too far, though; a ditzy third-person could probably get away with, "The dude with the great hair leaned into the window, bare chest glistening," but not, "The cop guy yelled into his radio-thingy and more cop stuff happened." There is a certain lofty perspective, a certain accuracy of observation and clarity of language, that all third person narratives require.
The trap that is impossible to escape in first person is that it does always feel like a motor-mouth internal monolog. Like the person is terribly self-absorbed and narrating their day as they go. Plus, of course, the voice is so present and so constant any verbal ticks are going to in time become extremely annoying.
(A previous and largely abandoned novel, I was going to alternate POV between a third-person narrator, deep immersion on the male protagonist and essentially truthful within his limits of understanding, and first person from the female protagonist but gaudy, sometimes even purple prose and a visibly blatant disregard for the actual facts in favor of a fairy-tale romanticism.)
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