2000 , Nelson Williams, Jr. , Blood Double , He stared for a few seconds, then asked with a dead-pan expression, “And some chiange?â€
2004 , Donna Robie , One Quiet Night: Murder in New Hampshire , Jimbo had seen many drifters in all his years, and they all had that dead-pan look in their eyes.
2015 , Mark Ravenhill , Citizenship, It might be better to see the title almost as comic, in its dead-pan announcement of an Important Political Issue.
Adverb
dead-pan
2007 , Frederik Pohl , Platinum Pohl, There was his left-hand head talking and sort of yapping that silly laugh of his, dead-pan, while the right-hand head was all creased up with giggle lines.
2012 , Pamela Hansford Johnson , Night and Silence, Who is Here?, Dead-pan, he took down Matthew's broken explanations, shook his hand warmly, refused a drink and a plaster for his leg, and ran for the first public call-box as hard as he could go.
2015 , Robin Stevens , Arsenic For Tea, "Why would you think that?" asked Daisy, dead-pan.
1936 , Edmund Wilson , Travels in Two Democracies , They are the eerie half-human attendants at anything that is new on Broadway — the dead-pans of the Theatre Guild openings.
1940 , Louis Adamic , From Many Lands , The older people have “Japanesey†dead-pans, whereas many of the American generation can display a great variety of emotions facially.
1971 , Manny Farber , Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies , Good coarse romantic-adventure nonsense, exploiting the expressive dead-pans of Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, a young man and a young woman who would probably enjoy doing in real life what they have to do here for RKO.
Verb
1983 , Rod McQueen , The Money-spinners, "I've long admired men who have risen from humble beginnings," Mulholland says, and then dead-pans: "Dr. Laffer was educated at Yale."
1999 , Gabriel Brahm , The Post-human Condition, Thus, "I know where I am," Bartleby dead-pans, when offered better food during his final incarceration.
2012 , Jackie Collins , American Star, 'I don't have a black tie,' she dead-panned. He didn't laugh.
