   Winter by Christopher Nicholson - book review: 'A 'literary
detective' doesn't quite get to the heart of Hardy'   In
Christopher Nicholson's Winter, Thomas Hardy becomes the latest
literary giant to provide the subject matter for a novel. J M
Coetzee and Colm Toíbín produced memorable works when they
imagined the minds of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henry James
respectively, while more recent novels about Emily Dickinson,
Herman Melville and H G Wells have achieved mixed results.  Even
the best books within this burgeoning sub-genre imply that
artistic greatness belongs to the past. Why didn't, say,
Dostoevsky fictionalise the life of Pushkin? Because he was busy
writing about what James urged Edith Wharton to confront: "the
immediate."  In 1924, Hardy is "among the last survivors of a
distant age", a Victorian man amid modern upheaval. When he
adapts his great novel, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for an
amateur dramatics group, he's captivated by Gertie Bugler, the
young woman who plays Tess, and insists that she