"it was a dark and stormy night," she exclaimed/purred/harrumphed

I spent a pleasant hourlong train ride collecting these verbs:

greeted
hesitanty replied, uttering
extended
spoke
chose to ignore
answered vaguely
twitched
said good-humoredly
courteously replied
coughed
persisted
interrupted
left it unsaid
touched
sighed
answered emphatically
muttered gloomily
asked
chomped
coughed fruitily
remarked sarcastically
gazed
exhausted the subject
scratched his ear
said absently
voice ... cracking
muttered up close to his ear
complained
cagily whispered
calling over his shoulder
sneaking up close
with a bellow
cried
shouted, half sobbing

Notice a pattern? They're all far more interesting ways of stating "he said." The story I read was The Last Mohican by Bernard Malamud, published in 1958. It's basically Ernest's Hemingway's briefcase but with postwar Jews in Rome. The hunt for the MacGuffin was enlivened by such rich, varied language describing dialogue attribution. It really helped me know who was saying what (which is undoubtedly a skill which would improve my own fiction writing).

Every genre has its own dialogue attribution conventions. Plays and screenwriting are (usually) straightforward, with the name in the margin followed by a colon (showing that a play is at heart, a script). Poetry can be narrative ("My Last Duchess" is spoken aloud but without quotation marks), and non-fiction can follow any of these three. (This interview with Malamud looks almost like a play.)

Do you think adverbs add to the dialogue style? If you were adapting this story to a play, would you include stage directions?