A hereditary class of graphs has bounded clique-width if and only if its prime members do, but this lifting property fails for linear clique-width. We prove that a hereditary class has bounded linear clique-width if and only if its prime members do and it contains neither all quasi-threshold graphs nor all complements of quasi-threshold graphs. This generalizes a result of Brignall, Korpelainen, and Vatter, who established the result for cographs.