Leopoldo Alas’ achievement as a writer of short stories is clearly more sporadic in character than his success with the full-length novel; it is none the less real. The ‘novela corta’ Supercheria is one of the peaks of that achievement. Laura de los Rios regards the story as a masterpiece by any standards and singles out for particular praise its rich and complex organization: ‘No tiene la novelistica espanola una novela breve comparable en la complejidad de sus elementos, en el manejo de sus reciprocas interferencias, con Supercheria’.