Three Month Fever:
The Andrew Cunanan Story
by Gary Indiana
Cliff Street/HarperCollins, $25 hard
Andrew Cunanan is further evidence that all the interesting murderers come from California. In Gary Indiana’s first book-length nonfiction, Three Month Fever, he writes that “People will put up with anything from the young and beautiful.” He’s right, while also offering up plenty of satisfying factoids: One of Cunanan’s favorite books was the classic novel of New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. Cunanan suffered from migraine headaches, likely caused in part by his obsession with the film actor Tom Cruise. He was writing a novel of the Philippines in Clairfontaine notebooks. And to give residents of Austin a further shiver, Cunanan reportedly visited here with Jeff Trail, one of the former lovers he murdered, a year or so before the multi-state killing spree. Three Month Fever reads like a trashy tabloid article: fast and fun. While Indiana’s pseudo-divination of what went on in Cunanan’s mind is a little troubling, who’s to say he’s wrong? It may have all happened exactly as Indiana says it did.
This article appears in September 3 • 1999.