Did suicide by cutting your throat with a straight razor used to be common?

[Zsofia]

Not to spoil anything, although it's hardly a spoiler as it's actually depicted on the cover of my edition and happens in the first 50 pages or so, I just finished a mystery written in the 1932 (contemporary at the time) where a young man is found with his throat cut and a straight razor nearby and everybody assumes he killed himself.

The hell? If I came across a body with a cut throat, the last thing I'd assume was that it was suicide. Wrists, sure. But cutting your own throat? I mean, seriously? (It was mentioned at the inquest that such suicides often took poison as a belt-and-suspenders measure in such cases, but still.)

It isn't like the author to wave her hands and make statements like that that just don't make sense. She had most people, including the papers, just assuming it was a suicide as if such things happened every day in 1932, and it was even supposed to be obvious that that was part of the murderer's plan. So, is that just a suicide method that's gone out of style with wider adoption of the safety razor?