Peter Heller in Crime Reads:
My mother was a private eye. She was petite and elegant, she could shoot and drive, and she was a crack investigator.
She was born in Paris in 1933 to an American banker and a Connecticut socialite and lived there until the Germans drove them out. She arrived in Manhattan speaking only French, and all she wanted to do was return to France and fight in the French Resistance. She was seven. Everywhere she went in New York City she would listen to groups of people talking and try to make out from their tone and gestures who was a Nazi spy. She had the investigative bent early on.
Once she had kids she got her P.I. license. About a week later the FBI called. They wondered if she could help them track down the perpetrator of a large fraud on the Bank of New York.
More here.