A Decent Ride (novel)

A Decent Ride is a 2015 novel by Irvine Welsh. Welsh returns to his character Terry Lawson, first introduced in Glue, this book taking place a further 10 years after the events of Porno during the 2011 Scottish Hurricane Bawbag. The book's title is a double-entendre on Lawson's sexual prowess, and his job in this novel as a taxi driver.

Terry Lawson, having met writers through giving them lifts during the Edinburgh Festival, decides that a literary education will aid him in his relentless sexual escapades and help him overcome his own loss of virility. He also meets Wee Jonty—a well-endowed, nice-but-dim character, similar to Porno's Curtis—whose girlfriend Jinty Magdalen has gone missing. Lawson agrees to help track her down, his "investigations" making him question the motivations of a prominent American businessman and TV star Ronald Checker (a pastiche of Donald Trump) and his role in Jinty's disappearance. The book's narration alternates between Lawson, Jonty and Checker.

The Financial Times identified the Checker character as "a Donald Trump-esque tycoon, with a grand, possibly devious, business plan.". Welsh himself told the Washington Post that Checker was “ a youthful, punkish version of Donald Trump”, though the paper reflected that "as obnoxious as this character [Checker] is, he doesn’t come close to his real-world model [Trump]" Trump was prominent in Scotland at the time the novel was set, developing an environmentally controversial golf course and publicly supporting Scottish Government policies (a theme within the book) while it suited his business needs, before falling out with Alex Salmond over his support for wind turbines—the novel plays on this and imagines and infers his sexual proclivities. Trump's subsequent rise to the presidency make the novel more relevant in its satire and its conceit of being 'taken for a ride' than it seemed at time of release. When challenged later on his opinions of Trump, Welsh stated that Checker was "a generic kind of demagogue" but that subsequent to the novel's release that "Trump...since he lost Iowa, has become more interesting. He's like some kind of game show participant."