“. . . a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 95)
Inelegantly expressed, but the thought is interesting.
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The construction harkens back to the Anglo-Saxon.
I’d say it’s clunky but elegant. Clunky because “thought-murder”
is, but elegant because it’s compact and precise. Absent the hyphen, “thought murder” might be the murder of a thought. With it, on the established model of thought-experiment, “thought-murder” must be a murder committed in thought only. Perhaps Gedankenmord had been better.