In time-varying frequency selective channels, to obtain high-rate joint time-frequency diversity, linear dispersion coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (LDC-OFDM), has recently been proposed. Compared with OFDM systems, single-carrier systems may retain the advantages of lower PAPR and lower sensitivity to carrier frequency offset (CFO) effects, which motivates this paper to investigate how to achieve joint frequency and time diversity for high-rate single-carrier block transmission systems. Two systems are proposed: linear dispersion coded cyclic-prefix single-carrier modulation (LDC-CP-SCM) and linear dispersion coded zero-padded single-carrier modulation (LDC-ZP-SCM) across either multiple CP-SCM or ZP-SCM blocks, respectively. LDC-SCM may use a layered two-stage LDC decoding with lower complexity. This paper analyzes the diversity properties of LDC-CP-SCM, and provides a sufficient condition for LDC-CP-SCM to maximize all available joint frequency and time diversity gain and coding gain. This paper shows that LDC-ZP-SCM may be effectively equipped with low-complexity minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) equalizers. A lower complexity scheme, linear transformation coded SCM (LTC-SCM), is also proposed with good diversity performance.